Cousine
A free alternative to Courier New
Cousine is the fixed-width member of the Chrome OS set, matching Courier New character box for character box, so an ASCII table, a code listing or a screenplay laid out in Courier keeps every column where it was. Where it departs from the original is weight: Courier New is famously thin on a screen, almost spidery, and Cousine puts real substance back into the strokes without touching a single width. Its own upstream blurb calls it a sans serif, which it plainly is not.
Alphabets
- Latin
- Latin Extendedaccented characters for most European languages
- Turkishincluding ı, İ, ğ, ş and the rest
- Cyrillic
- Cyrillic Extended
- Greek
- Greek Extended
- Vietnamesethe full set of stacked accents
- Hebrew
Weight — 400
Specification
- Designer
- Foundry
- Released
- Category
- Alternative to
- License
- Commercial use
- Good for
- Weights
- Styles
- Variable
- Glyphs
- Languages
- Download size
- Source
Size ladder
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Characters
Uppercase
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- X
- Y
- Z
Lowercase
- a
- b
- c
- d
- e
- f
- g
- h
- i
- j
- k
- l
- m
- n
- o
- p
- q
- r
- s
- t
- u
- v
- w
- x
- y
- z
Numerals
- 0
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
Punctuation & symbols
- .
- ,
- :
- ;
- !
- ?
- '
- "
- ‘
- ’
- “
- ”
- (
- )
- [
- ]
- {
- }
- /
- \
- |
- -
- –
- —
- _
- @
- #
- $
- %
- &
- *
- +
- =
- <
- >
- ~
- ^
- `
- €
- £
- ¥
- ©
- ®
- °
- §
- †
- •
- …
Use it on the web
@font-face {
font-family: 'Cousine';
/* The download contains .ttf files. Put yours wherever you serve static
files from and point this at it. Converting to .woff2 first cuts the
size by roughly 60% and every current browser supports it. */
src: url('/fonts/cousine.woff2') format('woff2');
font-weight: 400;
font-style: normal;
font-display: swap;
}
body {
font-family: 'Cousine', monospace;
}License
OFL-1.1
You may use, modify and redistribute this font, including in commercial work. You may not sell the font file on its own, and any modified version must be released under the same license and under a different name.
Commercial use allowed
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 Turkish 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.
- Does Cousine support Latin, Latin Extended, Turkish, Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Greek Extended, Vietnamese and Hebrew?
- Yes. 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.
- 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.