Define "First Five Pages" length

[TGRossi]

I've searched on this, and found conflicting advice. When an agent requests the first five (or whatever) pages , I am unclear on the length. Nowadays, my work lives as a Word Document. It has been suggested that 12 point font, double or 1.5 spaced is the usual. However, there is a huge difference between the resulting length based not only on margins and line spacing, but on font as well. Courier and other mono-spaced fonts are huge, and among other fonts (e.g. Arial vs Garamond). None of these corresponds to the ~250 words per page I use to estimate published length.
So what is recommended?
- Format as a manuscript for submission - Courier double spaced? It will be quite short
- Leave it as I do for Beta readers - Arial 12?
- Select the first ~ 1,250 words and format as needed?
- Something else?

[Qwerty]

Surprised this didn't attract replies. It's two years old now, of course, but "the first 5 pages" is, in my opinion, a critical element of a query. I've found advice on the Internet that says most agents aren't looking for an excuse to reject every query that comes into their world. But why give them an excuse? Do your best to present your "first 5 pages" as a powerful hook to encourage the agent to ask for more. Those first 5 pages are also a good example of your writing and how compliant you'll be when working with the agent's efforts to represent your story. In my case, the first 5 pages are my first chapter, and that's in 12-point Times New Roman single spaced -- unless the agent specifically asks for some other font or 1-1/2 or double spacing.

[JGS1985]

I take it to mean standard manuscript formatting, which is double-spaced. That doesn't work in an email or QueryManager, so I convert the double-spaced 5 pages into single-spaced block paragraphs for readability.