P.S. The manuscript rules have changed since I began submitting: it used to be Courier or Death, whether or not you were using a word-processor to produce the Mss. I'm glad Times is okay now. Does it make the manuscript harder to mark up?
As a copyeditor, I really appreciate writers who use Courier. Times is very dense, and it's harder to spot typos in it. Also, because it doesn't take up as much room, I'm expected to copyedit more words per hour than I am with Courier. (Most production departments--and I say this with fifteen years' experience--expect a freelancer to copyedit ten pages per hour, regardless of how those pages are formatted.) That's a lot when you have as many things to take care of in a manuscript (http://deannahoak.livejournal.com/38288.html) as we do.
You know, I sometimes freelance copyedit, too, and I never put these things together before, and now that you've pointed it out, I will always make sure that I transmit my own manuscripts to production in Courier New. I love copyeditors and I want to make their lives easier!
(I cannot believe I never put two and two together before and realized these things. *hides face in shame*)
I loathe the look of Courier--don't ask me why, I just do. But do I know how the game is played and, more than that, I don't want to piss off the editor and the copyeditor, who are my Friends, I compose in Palatino and, before I submit the ms., change it over to Courier. The whole point of manuscript format is to make your writing as easy to access as possible so that the editor and copyeditor and all other divers hands can do what they need to with it, the better to print it up and sell millions of copies.
I'm so glad you said this. I've always favored Times--Courier is just so very ugly--but a happy copyeditor makes a writer look good. It's all Courier from now on.
Have you ever seen the Monaco font? It's a relatively big monospaced font where every single character is different (1, l, I and | are all easy to distinguish, as are 0 and O) that, IMHO, is just prettier than Courier (as a programmer, it's my font of choice).
As far as I am concerned, Times is fine for my eyes. On the other hand, as you will see below, copyeditors take care of different aspects than line editors/acquiring editors do, and they prefer Courier.
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(I cannot believe I never put two and two together before and realized these things. *hides face in shame*)
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Are all the i's dotted with little skulls?
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Font 'o Death
(Anonymous) 2006-03-31 01:53 am (UTC)(link)http://www.dafont.com/death-struggle.font
Does that count?
Oh wait, I should have asked how MUCH money you were willing to bet FIRST. Darn.