Cousine
Steve MattesonSphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Monospace · 2 weights · OFL · Türkçe
Free Courier New alternatives
Monotype's redrawing of Howard Kettler's Courier (1955), and the default typewriter face on Windows.
Why people look for a Courier New alternative
Courier New is the typewriter, and it is on every machine because Windows put it there rather than because anybody licensed it. Screenplays, legal filings and courts still specify it by name, and the moment one of those documents has to be a web page or a PDF built on a server, the font cannot travel with it.
What a Courier New substitute has to get right
Metric-compatible widths. Courier New is what legal and screenplay formats are specified in, where a page count is a requirement rather than a preference.
The one in this archive
One entry, because one is the honest answer. A face is listed here only if the substitution would survive a designer looking at both.
Courier New and its free alternatives, at a glance
- How you get it
- Installed with Windows and macOS
- Pass it on, embed it or self-host it
- Not permitted by its licence
- On a website
- Only as a system font, on machines that already have it
Courier New
| Property | Cousine |
|---|---|
| Licence | OFL-1.1 — free, commercial use allowed |
| Weights | 400, 700 |
| Variable | No |
| Italic | Yes |
| Türkçe | Yes |
| Other alphabets | Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Greek Extended, Vietnamese, Hebrew |
| Glyphs | 2,396 |
| Web font | 40 KB Latin cut |
Questions
- What is the best free alternative to Courier New?
- Cousine — it is the closest match in this archive, and the page above says which shapes the substitution turns on. It is the only one listed, because one honest match is a better answer than a longer list of near misses.
- Are these Courier New alternatives free for commercial use?
- Yes. Every font on this site is under a licence that permits commercial use with no fee and no attribution requirement, mostly the SIL Open Font License. That covers paid client work, products you sell, self-hosting on a website, and embedding in an application. The licence file is inside every download.
- Can I use a Courier New alternative in a logo?
- Yes. An open font licence covers the font software rather than the shapes you set with it, so a logo made with one of these can be trademarked like any other. What you cannot do is claim rights over the typeface itself.
- Will a Courier New substitute keep my layout the same?
- Only if it is metrically compatible — drawn so every character occupies the same width as the original, which makes a document reflow identically. Very few faces are, and where one is, this site says so on its page. Everything else will look similar and set differently, so a layout built to the original's widths needs checking rather than assuming.