Cousine

Size ladder

Specification

Designer

Steve Matteson

Released

2010

Category

Monospace

Alternative to

Courier New

License

OFL-1.1

Commercial use

Allowed

Good for

Documents, Code snippets, Terminals, Plain-text layouts

Weights

400, 700

Styles

Normal, Italic

Variable

No

Glyphs

2,396

Languages

Latin, Latin Extended, Türkçe, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Greek Extended, Vietnamese, Hebrew

Download size

667 KB

Source

github.com/googlefonts/cousine

Questions

Is Cousine free for commercial use?

Yes. Cousine is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows commercial use with no fee and no attribution requirement. You can use it in client work, in products you sell, on the web and in print. The one thing you may not do is sell the font file on its own. The licence is inside the download.

Can I use Cousine in a logo?

Yes. The licence covers the font software, not the artwork you make with it, so a logo set in Cousine belongs to you — including if you later register it as a trademark. You do not need permission and you do not owe anything to Steve Matteson. What the licence stops you doing is redistributing the font file itself as a product.

How do I install Cousine?

Download the zip and unzip it. On a Mac, select the 4 font files inside and open them, then press Install Font. On Windows, select them, right-click and choose Install. Restart any application that was already open before it will show up.

Does Cousine support Turkish?

Yes. Cousine includes the characters Türkçe needs that plain Latin does not — the dotless ı, the dotted İ, and ğ, ş, ü, ö and ç in both cases. This was checked against the font file itself, not assumed from the fact that it covers Latin.

What languages does Cousine support?

Cousine covers Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Greek Extended, Vietnamese and Hebrew, across 2,396 glyphs. Anything outside those alphabets is not included — the character map further up this page shows exactly what you get.

Does Cousine support Cyrillic?

Yes. Cousine includes the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Cyrillic Extended set as well, which adds the letters for languages beyond Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian. This was read from the font file itself. The complete WOFF2 and the zip both carry it; only the Latin-only web file leaves it out.

What weights does Cousine come in?

Cousine comes in 2 weights: Regular (400) and Bold (700). Each weight is its own file in the download.

Is there a smaller, Latin-only version of Cousine?

Yes — the "WOFF2 · Latin only" button on this page. It is 40 KB against 107 KB for the complete file, 63% smaller, with every weight the family has still in it. It covers Latin and Latin Extended, which is everything a page in English, Turkish or a western European language sets — Türkçe included, since ı, İ, ğ and ş all live in that range. Take the complete file instead if you set Cyrillic, Greek or any alphabet outside Latin.

Where can I download Cousine as WOFF2?

From the WOFF2 button on this page — the file is cousine.woff2, and it is about 107 KB. It is the complete font repacked for the web rather than a cut-down copy: the same glyphs, the same spacing and the same hinting as the .ttf in the download, roughly 60% smaller. Every browser still receiving updates reads WOFF2, so it is the only web format most sites need. Google Fonts does not offer this file for download at all — it serves WOFF2 from its own servers and gives you .ttf if you ask for the family.

Is Cousine a drop-in replacement for Courier New?

For spacing, yes. Cousine is metrically compatible with Courier New, so every character sits in a box of the same width and anything that depends on alignment — code, tables of figures, screenplays formatted to industry rules — comes out identical. The visible difference is that Cousine is noticeably sturdier. Courier New was drawn from typewriter strikes and renders very light on screen, and Cousine thickens the strokes while leaving the widths alone, so it reads better without breaking the layout you were protecting.