These measures are bullshit and often just come down to a prevalent societal ‘temperament’ that’s inculcated from birth.
I live and have family in Sweden and the rest of my family is in Spain. The Swedes have immense pride in their country and pretty much only talk about the positives. When the winters are dark, cold, rain has been pouring for fourteen days straight and the last time you saw sun was 4 weeks ago, they say “there’s no bad weather just bad clothes”.
One day I sat with my cousin and some other relatives in the olive grove of his country place in Spain - sun was shining and we’d been eating delicious locally produced food for hours and drinking wine from his vineyard while he yapped on about how everything in Spain is ‘shit’ (una mierda).
And this is why places like Finland are reportedly the ‘happiest’ in the world.
We’ve had about 1 hour of sunlight so far in december where i live in Finland, but it’s fine. It also makes the sun way more enjoyable when it finally shines in the summer.
I’d never want to live in perpetual summer. Seasons brings joy.
> I’d never want to live in perpetual summer. Seasons brings joy
Even this is a typical myth that I often hear from Scandinavians. In fact different parts of Spain (or England or France) have also clearly demarcated seasons.
If you want to experience the joy of Autumn then the crisp, long days of an English Fall are incomparably more distinct than the unrelenting darkness that’s almost indistinguishable from Winter in Scandinavia, for instance.
And when Spring comes to the valleys of the temperate regions of Spain, then the blossom and explosion of wild flowers is miraculous.
But like I said, from preschool onwards Scandinavians are indoctrinated with the belief that they live in the best of all possible worlds, and no amount of actual experience can ever dent that notion.
> Not sure that "crisp" is a word I'd use to describe any part of the UK in autumn - probably more like "soggy" - but that applies to any season!
From the gently self-deprecating nature of your answer I’m guessing you’re British - and this is indeed the whole point of what I’m saying.
I genuinely and deeply miss this aspect of the English character which is totally lacking in Sweden - the websites called “shitLondon” or the insistence that English food is inferior to Italian or French cuisine or this repeated idea that it always rains (it doesn’t). That self-mockery simply doesn’t exist here, apart from when it’s some sort of humble-brag.
I don't see how that makes the measure bullshit. Outlook and expectations are related to happiness. If you want for nothing but have little it's better than a never ending treadmill of more.
Having a culture that produces happier people in worse circumstances doesn't make those people less happy.
Yes, absolutely. How else would you define it? The whole point of happiness is that is a subjective, internal state. If you just want to know if people live in a cold, dark climate you don't need to ask them.
This is a great product, and without meaning to underestimate the value of a ‘makers’ project I really wish it could be manufactured at scale with a metal body and a mount that could take a wider range of lenses.
Anyone currently interested in this breadth of formats would need to spend maybe 20 thousand dollars to buy cameras like the Hasselblad Xpan, the Plaubel Makina 67, and one of the Fujica 690 bodies.
Putting all this into one body is almost miraculous.
Lomo have recently released a nicely featured 35mm film camera[1]. I wish something like the MRF2 could also be produced in this way.
I also am a huge supporter of DIY projects. Also a huge fan of medium-format, film photography.
To that end, if I can help others try medium format film, I want to add that there are plenty of inexpensive used medium-format cameras on eBay. I have purchased perhaps a dozen over the years—none of which even approached US $1000. In case you are not DIY inclined…
(Sadly, Japan has been the best place to order used camera gear but that has become cost prohibitive now for this American.)
Searching just now on eBay for "Yaschica TLR Mint" shows a number of cameras around $300 that are probably excellent (surprise, most are from Japan).
Can't afford a Hasselblad? Try "Bronica Mint" on eBay. Looks like $500 will get you in the game.
Mamiya cameras are built like tanks (and weigh as much). You could do a lot worse: "Mamiya Mint" is going to get you a few great models around $400 or so.
All of these were (are) considered damn fine film cameras.
(Mamiya tend to have interchangeable lenses, as does the Bronica. There are some Wide/Tele adapters for the Yashica, but generally you use them as-is. Most of these cameras are completely manual in operation—the more sought after Yashica though have some light-metering capabilities.)
(The Yashica and some of the Mamiya are TLR, twin-lens reflex—more or less equivalent to a rangefinder? The Bronica and some Mamiya you view through the lens 'TTL'.)
Thank you for not calling film photography "analog" -- I've been at it for 25 years and I'm also an engineer, and I cringe still everytime I hear/read "analog" photography, while there are plenty of accurate adjective that could be used. Like, as you did, "film" or "chemical" or even "Silver" as the french do.
As for medium format, there are hundreds of Folding cameras that are pretty much as good as the obvious massive SLRs people are so keen on. I own and use a dozen of them, some of them absolutely legendary, like Zeiss Ikontas or Super Isolettes or the russian Iskras and Moskvas.
Quite frankly, having owned a few SLRs myself (I only kept a Bronica S2A with a 50mm lens) I more often than not use the folders because, well, for one thing I can literally have 3 in my bag with 3 different films! The good ones are as good or better than the SLRs, and as long as you don't mind a fixed lens, they do the job very well and often as way more character than the "system"'s ones.
I agree with you, but my point was aimed at people who might think that even a couple of thousand dollars would be too much to spend on a film camera, whereas used Xpans (with an unknown electronic lifespan) are commonly selling for in excess of $7k.
Otherwise I fully agree that buying old film cameras is still both the most practical and most fun way to get into the hobby.
My Xpan is now over 25 years old, and I've been doing stuff like this with it for over a decade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIy2_IpEw8c # electronics are still holding strong... for now. They tend to have more mechanical problems than electrical problems in my experience. But yes, I certainly wouldn't spend anything like what they are going for these days.
Albert (the subject of the original article here) is a former colleague and I recently visited him at home where he showed me his studio and the cameras he'd been creating. All very cool stuff.
I inherited a few Mamiyas with broken shutter release, and unfortunately have not been able to find a shop willing to repair: they specifically said “we won’t touch Mamiyas”
I see Fuji GW690 bodies with a 90mm lens on various sites like keh in the $1200 range.
I have a Hasselblad 500 series camera from the 1980's that my father bought at a pawn shop near a military base. In the early 2000's professionals were dumping tons of medium format gear as they switched to digital cameras so he got a wide and telephoto lens. The problem is I never use them. They are big, heavy, klunky, and slow to operate. I've never liked print film. I used to be able to get 2 hour development of E-6 slide film but now I have to mail it off and wait over a week so I don't bother. I look at digital backs but most of them are for studio setups.
My dad used to have that Hasselblad model a loooong time ago. If you are willing to part with it (for less than the "collector" price these are sold nowadays), you could make a nice Christmas gift for him.
(I am Rhododender on Reddit)
You absolutely do not need to pay $20k for a medium format rangefinder. You can buy a Plaubel Makina for $2k-$3k right now and that's one of the more expensive options.
> Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible…
> Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change.
-1. One of the most famous biggest budget dudes, Stanley Kubrick, using an ultra rare incredibly special f/0.7 he bargained with NASA to get is, to me, an argument not that the past was great with natural lighting & could use it. It's an argument that that was the hardest most difficult costly & inaccessible upper-est echelon of what was possible, that only a couple rare gods of cinema had any access to dark natural lighting.
A focal plane mere inches thick!
Incredibly wild constraints here. It's incredibly fun to read about & folks should!
But everything about the Barry Lyndon story & the extreme effort to make it validates the top post to me. Our modern sensors are just stratospherically better & wildly unconstraining vs the past.
When they stop releasing security patches for that OS version 2 years later, it becomes more risky to connect the thing to a network. Or take in any data from the outside, really, whether it's via Bluetooth, or USB drive.
And then there's 3rd party software that will stop supporting that old OS version, in part because Apple's dev tools make that difficult.
Eventually, Apple's own services will stop supporting that OS - no convenient iCloud support.
Finally, the root CA certs bundled with the OS will become too out of date to use.
I'm planning on putting Linux on my Intel Mac Mini soon. But when a M3+ Mini goes out of support, will we have that option?
I’ve got a 2010 MBP that’s still perfectly suitable, but without OS updates, I can’t get a browser that websites will load cleanly on, can’t use Xcode, bunch of the Apple services the company hooks you on don’t work, etc. Used OpenCore bootloader to extend its life into newer macOSes, but that’s getting hard to keep up with. What a (e)waste.
Hadn't thought of doing that - I'm not a natural Linux person myself and I'm repurposing it for an 11yo. But maybe it's not so different from their school Chromebook for what they need. Just removes some of the nice Apple family features and the apps they'd be inheriting, but that's what I get for not paying the tax with new hardware purchases.
I’ve got a “late 2008” MacBook Pro that connects to sites ok in Firefox. That seems to be the browser that does the best at long-term support for old Macs.
Both those machines will run the latest Ubuntu just fine, and the latest Chrome (or Firefox) on it.
Just copy the LiveCD image onto a USB stick, insert, boot holding down the Option key, and you can try it without actually installing it (i.e. leaving your MacOS untouched).
Sure. But my needs haven't exceeded that RAM. I just want to keep doing the things I was doing for years on it happily, but security updates, broken services and website bloat have intervened.
Just switch to linux and it should just work. There are distros that use very little ram and it stays updated. Noscript can help you block javascript on websites
A 15 year old device can be still as capable as a raspberry pi and those work fine now for modern computing
Depends if you use xcode or not...I still have my macbook 12inch, for work use, it is amazing, but I can't run the latest xcode, making it defunct for some of my uses. It would be fine running xcode weak as it is; i am sure. Liquid glass might have killed it tho.
Patches for old OS versions are unfortunately not 100% covering all security issues. Apple is often arguing that vulns can only be fixed in actively supported versions.
Living in Stockholm I’m so envious of the way the Danes are truly committed to cycle traffic instead of the window-dressing we have here.
This type of practical measure is unthinkable here, where a cyclist often has to stop at traffic lights and press a button to request a green signal - even when car-traffic is at a standstill.
It all leads to more friction and dangerous risk-taking - where cyclists end-up ignoring lights instead - endangering both themselves, pedestrians and even other cyclists.
That's a case of the line must always go up. Except for mortality and down. This affects all modals, cars, bikes, pedestrians, the times to clear the crossing increase, the time during which different directions can move decreases.
> I would also remind the short of memory that during covid, the states with the most draconian restrictions were mostly left-leaning, and many were loathe to give up that control.
Control of the people comes from all sides
This depiction of Covid restrictions (restrictions that were actually relatively permissive given the seriousness of the disease and the unknown nature of the virus at the time) as though they were an authoritarian power grab by malevolent politicians instead of a health policy, is part of the problem.
Maybe if people had been willing to accept a small curtailment of their personal desires for a short time for the sake of the common good, rather than framing it as a dictatorial punishment,we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re heading into now.
None of the COVID measures had any effect on public health and yet they were enforced long after that became obvious to anyone watching the graphs the government themselves published. And the nature of the virus was known within weeks of it appearing - there were no real surprises from that point on. It acted very similarly to any other respiratory virus with the only differences being the unusually steep gradient in age effects.
COVID was 100% an authoritarian power grab by public health officials. Zero percent actual health. And public health is an overwhelmingly left wing and political field, being as it is the idea that health should be managed collectively.
I’d question the effectiveness: I stood opposite a young guy who just clean fainted on one of the hottest days. He fell like an axed tree-trunk in the heat.
After a few minutes he was fine again, but he’d slid on the floor straight into my bag from the alcohol store and broken my wine-bottle at around 4pm on a Saturday. Anyone who knows Sweden will understand who came out of the experience worse.
Given it was hot enough to faint someone at 4pm, wine would be waste already being in such temperature for more than an hour (systembolaget closes at 3pm)?
> Given it was hot enough to faint someone at 4pm, wine would be waste already being in such temperature for more than an hour (systembolaget closes at 3pm)?
People living in Spain and France just throw away their wine if they haven’t consumed it one hour after purchase?
The company I work for expanded enormously from 2021 onwards, aiming to recruit the absolute best talent available regardless of location. None of this was ‘offshoring’ - we just cast a broad net over Europe and genuinely hauled in the highest level of programmers, designers and managers I have ever worked with in over thirty years in the software development business.
In 2024 a new CEO decided to encourage RTO and from then onwards the level of recruitment has just tanked. The only criterion for employment is pretty much “how enthusiastic are you about working at the office?”
Now we have compulsory office-days and I see firsthand the way these people just waste time walking around with a coffee-cup shooting the breeze, or sitting in half-day meetings.
His point was that they exchanged hiring people who are not like that because of the good deal they got to people who are like that because the deal they got is not as good comparatively.
And my point is, the people who are making those decisions are just bubbling it down from the top, and they don't care if it's a good decision or not, just that they're going to look good for following orders.
If everyone's doing nothing, and their boss is happy, then they're happy, too, because maybe they'll get promoted and a better raise and a better bonus.
If everyone's getting a lot done, and their boss isn't happy, then they're not happy either, because they probably won't get the raise and the bonus and the promotion that they wanted.
They don't care about the business. At all.
Obviously some people do. But that's not the norm.
> and I see firsthand the way these people just waste time walking around with a coffee-cup shooting the breeze, or sitting in half-day meetings.
This point is a bit naive or misguided. Slackers are to be found in a fully remote setup as well. Also, hustlers like Soham Parekh or North Koreans impersonators are only possible in a fully remote setup.
On the bright side said talent will now be relocating to new pastures and the new CEO will be shuffled out the door with a new boat or two for their troubles.
Is this the wrong time to rant about font licensing though? I’ve always bought and paid for fonts, but as I’ve gradually transitioned to mobile app development, I one day realized that all the fonts I bought for print are now worthless to me.
These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price. But if your hobby is making apps, then suddenly the same font will cost you 50 times more - for a single year.
I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars. Maybe if their licenses were more realistic, piracy would be less of a problem.
There is maybe nothing in the entire world that I am less sympathetic towards than the cause of font piracy / font liberation. You have perfectly good --- in fact, historically excellent --- fonts loaded by default for free on any computer you buy today. Arguing for the oppression of font licenses is, to me, like arguing about how much it costs to buy something at Hermès. Just don't shop at Hermès.
I agree the average person is likely fine with the fonts on their computer, but this is profoundly misunderstanding the importance of design. Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for centuries.
I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
Even under this analogy you're complaining about the price of luxury goods and saying that it's no wonder people shoplift to steal the truffles because they're so darn expensive.
If you can't afford the license for the font, your app is small-time enough that you can make do with one of the many, many high-quality fonts that are available for free, there's no need to pirate it. If your app is big enough that the difference matters, then you can likely afford the sticker price.
No, I'm saying a Michelin chef can complain about a 50x increase in the cost of truffles without negating the fact that a lot of people happily survive on ramen.
I think there's some confusion in who is responding to whom, then. I never said anything about piracy, but the person responding to me may have confused me with the top-level comment.
All I have done is defend the importance of typography, and never mentioned piracy or stealing.
Typography is important. So important that we have really good looking fonts available for free. And a custom font isn’t going to be the deciding factor in whether your next AI powered social graph app sinks or floats. Guaranteed.
Because designers fuss a lot about nearly undetectable differences in color, fonts, and many other things. Maybe they make a difference in the aggregate. But if you can’t identify the difference between Ariak and Helvetica (to pick a particularly glaring example) you’re probably not one of those designers.
I agree. Many people can hardly tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica. There used to be a website where you could test how good you are at telling them apart.
You won't notice many small differences between certain fonts. But that doesn't mean they're unnecessary. As you said, they make a difference when taken together. For screens, there are a number of adjustments and techniques that improve screen readability. Hinting, separate designs, contrast for low dpi and subpixel rendering compatibility, for example. At least some of the optimizations don't work out of the box, but have to be adjusted by designers.
That's why it can happen that a font you bought for print media now requires an extra license for websites and apps.
There are plenty of wonderfully readable fonts for the web and apps that are free and sufficient for most projects. If you want something special, I don't think it's wrong to pay for it. Personally, I would prefer more reasonable prices, though.
And there are also design fashions. I tend to dislike a lot of the current designs by seemingly 20 something’s with perfect vision that use rake-thin fonts in some grey tone.
Same, 18/20 for me. The all caps on MATTEL got me, and the STAPLES one as well, for some reason.
But the differences on the lowercase "t" and "s", uppercase "g", the number 3, and both upper an lowercase "c", are obvious. Helvetica is much more refined.
There are good reasons why well designed typography is expensive. A lot of thought and effort went into designing every line and curve. Even if most people can't consciously appreciate these details, they experience it subconsciously by how the design makes them feel. This is why brand designers are well paid. Anyone can design a logo, but to make a design that transmits a specific feeling, that requires a lot of skill. And typography is a core component of this.
Yeah MATTEL was the one instance where the difference wasn’t clear. I still had a gut feeling but couldn’t really justify it logically like I could for the others.
Maybe "this font is offensively priced to the point where I immediately think the person selling it is a criminal using this for money laundering, or clinically insane" and "it's hard to sell enough fonts to live off of" are related?
Maybe if charlatans didn't say with a straight face that a font should be sold on a subscription model they'd sell more? Maybe if it didn't cost as much as a car they'd sell more?
apparently not so important that "a custom font isn’t going to be the deciding factor in whether your next AI powered social graph app sinks or floats."
No, those things aren't comparable. Truffles have a functional role in a dish. A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role in a document, compared to the high-quality freely-available alternatives. This is like complaining about some kind of specially-carved or dyed truffle.
I respect you a ton (genuinely, I think you're the most interesting writer in the tech space), but you have a profound misunderstanding of the importance of typography if you think the only reason you'd need a paid typeface is the same reason you'd need a Hermes bag. I know you're a curious person, so hopefully you take this as an opportunity to open your horizons on the importance of it.
I'm a typeface nerd. Bringhurst is one of 3 books on the end-table next to me right now. I spend a stupid amount of money for Hoefler fonts for my dumb blog.
This to me is like the Menswear Guy on Twitter, who will explain in very great detail to you why the Hermès product is significantly better than the generic alternative. He's right, but he also understands that you buy the Hermès product to make a statement. Spend money on that statement if you want --- I do --- but don't try to pretend you have a right to it.
(i don't mean i own any hermes products; just stupidly expensive typefaces)
I don't want to get too deep into this because it doesn't matter to my point (you're also not entitled to eat truffled dishes any more than you're entitled to eat ortolans). But: set a document in one text face or another; it won't much matter at all to the experience of reading it (unless you pick a bad text face). Leave the truffle out of a risotto and you've made a different dish.
The important subtext of this thread is that, when we're talking about functional typesetting, the solutions space is pretty constrained. There aren't that many things you can do with a text face (vs. a display face). And you already have available to you extremely high-quality, well-hinted text faces at a full range of weights.
While we're on this subject, which extremely high-quality, well-hinted text faces that are freely available would you personally recommend to web and app designers?
Take any famous wordmark and replace it with a different typeface. You have a different wordmark. Typefaces aren't only used in body text. If you've read Bringhurst and are a typeface nerd, you should know you're arguing in bad faith. (Also generally like your comments, fyi, but you should know not to chime in that way about that topic on HN where the average attitude to anything design related is a mix of contempt and ignorance).
There are plenty of wordmarks that use no pre-designed typeface at all (NASA, Disney, Coca Cola); you're clearly not entitled to the vectors of those marks so you can repurpose them in your own work. Not to mention that most of the greatest wordmarks of all time were designed without any access to per-impression-licensed commercial fonts!
(I do not think it is the case that HN shuns design and I do not think you will be able to support with evience a claim that I'm ignorant of type design or commenting in bad faith).
Correct. And those are the wordmarks I'm not talking about. Let me try it differently: Would you say typeface choice plays no functional role in the branding of companies that do rely on pre-designed typefaces? Vignelli's work would look the same with different fonts? No, you know that's just absurd. Or are we just equivocating on "functional" here? If we're talking about letter forms, certainly looking a certain way is part of their function? And I know you know more than the average guy about type design, which is precisely why I'm confused as to why you would go for that seemingly meta-contrarian take.
It's not a contrarian take. The argument I'm making is simple. If you're doing functional type design, such as setting a book or a magazine article or a user interface, you have a wealth of viable faces available that do not involve per-impression licensing; many are free, some even came installed with your computer. If you're doing logo design, everything is out the window anyways: a wordmark is an aesthetic statement. If you're a designer, and you're designing a mark, and your best idea requires you to license a Monotype font with per-impression licensing, and you don't want to do that, just use your next best idea. That design challenge is really not much different than having your best idea depend on access to NYT Cheltenham, which you can't use at any price. Or, for that matter, the vectors of the FedEx logo.
I'm not blowing you off. I'm taking your argument seriously. It just doesn't hold.
> If you're doing functional type design, such as setting a book or a magazine article or a user interface, you have a wealth of viable faces available that do not involve per-impression licensing; many are free, some even came installed with your computer.
This is well put and thanks for engaging with the argument in good spirits.
I imagine that fonts often matter a lot for brand identity and specific use cases (like programming) will also have specific aspects of importance (like ligatures in particular to a lot of folks and being able to tell symbols apart at a glance so IloO0 etc. don’t present issues, but for many use cases some utilitarian “good enough” choice will suffice, because there are a lot of competently made free fonts out there.
Then we aren't disagreeing. I never said anything about stealing or piracy; I agree with you that not being able to afford something doesn't give you the right to take it.
I think we're responding to different things. You're upset the original person mentioned piracy, whereas I took their rant to be more about licensing changes being yet another way companies are creeping up prices from one-time-purchase to rent-forever. You used to be able to pay for a font and use it in a magazine, but now you have to pay per impression.
And moreso, I'm annoyed by most of the comments saying that the free fonts on your computer should be enough.
No, we disagree. I think those companies should creep up their prices. There aren't enough type designers employed in the world. The social cost to cumbersome font licensing is essentially zero; in fact, for the reason I gave just one sentence ago, it probably tilts the other direction.
Further: the free fonts on your computer are enough. You can do the full range of type design with what ships on Win10 or macOS, and you can do it strikingly. I cringe at my dumb blog typefaces today, because I could get an equally striking effect with the standard web font stack; most of the work is in setting the text, not in picking a particularly mannered typeface.
Okay, we disagree then! I hope you take the time to reflect on how weird and aggressive you've made this whole conversation, but it seems this is where we part ways.
Typefaces do have functional roles, they {exude} a point in culture and time (the fonts that HN supports certainly time-stamps it).
edit: HN won't allow Fraktur[1] characters, even though they are in the unicode standard. Yet more evidence that font matters for the tone of the message you deliver.
> A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role in a document
100% incorrect. There are fonts that are made specifically to increase legibility for a dyslexic audience. If that's not a functional role than I don't know what is.
Oh for God's sake. You also can't set an instruction manual entirely in DIN Grindel Milk. The implied subtext was the functional equivalence of free and unfree display fonts. The most popular dyslexia font in the world is free.
I'm skeptical that any of these fonts actually make a difference. (Although if you like Comic Sans, you might as well continue using it; it doesn't do any harm.)
Cheap "truffle oil" can fill that role as much as a free font can fill the role of a premium one. The real truffle and the premium font have a functional role for the few people who can tell either apart. For the rest maybe anything works, just put something on the plate or screen.
A high price in a font won't sink a business as a high price in truffle would for a Michelin chef... The price of a font for a business is extremely negligible... Or again you shouldn't buy it if your business is too small. And if it's that small you should be able to justify the value added by buying that font as truffle does for the chef.
Well the analogy falls apart because (among many, many other reasons) the people eating at Michelin rated restaurants, especially 3-star, are completely insensitive to the price. It will cost whatever it costs and there will still be a long wait to get a table, if you even can.
So rather than pretending we're talking about truffles, let's just talk about fonts directly without strained analogies. Fonts, which the majority of people don't even recognize. 90% of people don't even know what a foundry is. Your average person can't tell the difference between any two fonts if they're both sans-serif or serif.
It doesn't fall apart, you have examples that actually match it. Marketing boutiques of website creators match the 3-star Michelin analogy. High budgets from their customers (think LVMH) are the norm. And they will love and understand paying X for a font. In fact they will almost expect this type of thing in the design process.
At the end of the day if people don't see the difference and the value between a free and a priced one, then they don't need to steal and can just use the free ones. There are plenty of amazing free fonts anyway some being the actual roots of many paying ones, and the gold standards.
Try this analogy out: it's no wonder that people are interested in / have demand for generic reproductions of licensed cultivars of a plant (e.g. buying generic "grape tomatoes" rather than specific, expensive "cherry tomatoes.")
It's also no wonder that people will happily buy these generics even when they're not white-box reverse-engineered phenotype reproductions via independent breeding, but carefully bred-true genetic descendants of the proprietary original cultivar (a.k.a. "seed piracy" — the thing Monsanto goes to extreme lengths to stop people from doing with their GMO wheat.)
That's not true at all. You think games would feel as immersive if everything was Calibri? Magazine-style articles would feel as tactile if they all used the same system fonts? Etc.
You may not care about fonts, but to say they don't matter is a misunderstanding. For example, I could glibly say we only need one programming language (the user doesn't care what syntax you used before it was compiled down to 1s and 0s!), but any engineer would make the case why that's not true at all.
No, I think we're just looking at it from different perspectives.
Yes, most people are fine choosing from the fonts available on their computer when writing a document.
But that's not what me nor OP are talking about. We're talking about shipping software (like a mobile app), or publishing a blog post. In that case, the best you can specify is either a very common font (Helvetica, etc), or a high-level classification (serif, sans-serif, etc).
There are many free fonts out there, yes, but there's a reason they're free. The quality for a majority of them is significantly lower, and many designs come with constraints (either utilitarian or stylistic). You don't have to agree, but I'm not being absurd or lacking sincerity.
You're also just going around and commenting the same thing on each of my posts. But don't limit your understand to just my writing here; there's thousands of books about the importance of typography if you're curious to learn more.
> There are many free fonts out there, yes, but there's a reason they're free.
Go on and tell me what that reason is then. Are you also going to tell me free open-source software, like Linux is low-quality because its free?
> The quality for a majority of them is significantly lower
Again, a completely baseless, unprovable assertion.
> You don't have to agree, but I'm not being absurd or lacking sincerity.
What do you call your example of using Calibri for everything in response to someone suggesting the use of free fonts?
You are lacking sincerity and making absurd claims. Almost everything else you say is literally baseless rhetoric that you are unable to back up with data or any objective argument.
> there's thousands of books about the importance of typography if you're curious to learn more.
It's amazing that you apparently know of thousands of such books, but are unable to make one coherent, objective argument to back up your claims.... did you read them?
You’ve been combative throughout this thread, and it's clear that you don’t see typography or design as disciplines that warrant serious thought. I don't think you're actually willing to engage with an explanation of why it matters but I'll try anyway.
System fonts are the absolute bottom of the barrel. Some are well designed but using any of them is a visual shorthand that you didn't care enough to put thought into your design. You're associating your product with the ocean of amateur work on the internet, giving the impression you copy pasted a template.
There are some high quality free fonts typically backed by massive organizations with actual typographic expertise. Most free fonts however, are amateur work that are technically and functionally lacking. Professional fonts are well designed at all weights, they're carefully spaced, they include much larger character sets to support more languages, contain features like lining and non-lining figures, variable font weights, small caps... are those all slight differences?
There’s a reason so many articles exist with titles like “Google Fonts That Don’t Suck”. Most of them do. If you are a professional whose job requires working with type, then choosing a font is foundational to your product. Arguing that all design is BS is just lazy; it's not a coherent argument.
I highly recommend practicaltypography.com, a free web book that discusses all of this and more, including why system fonts are bad and why a professional typeface is worth paying for.
This claim that system fonts are the "bottom of the barrel" is just so clearly false that I don't understand how you can be an advocate of typography and say it. Both Microsoft and Apple put huge amounts of effort into typography, contract or employ well-regarded designers, and their outputs are themselves well-regarded.
If you wanted to say "most of what's on Google Fonts is bottom of the barrel", you'd have a colorable argument. But that isn't what you said.
San Francisco is a great font. Arial is a perfectly functional semi-clone of Helvetica, Times New Roman is a decent interpretation of Plantin. Roboto is an interesting mash-up of Helvetica, DIN, and a few others.
System font from a web standpoint means you get one of these depending on the user's choice of phone, desktop, and/or browser.
It is somewhat like buying art because the frame covers a blemish on the wall. That the print inside the frame might be of a famous impressionist painting does not mean that the frame or the print necessarily go with the room.
The car analogy involves a car rental place - that they may give you any one of several newish, functional and even stylish vehicles does not change that you may often wind up being paired with a vehicle mismatched for your function.
Around the time Matthew Carter was creating Georgia, one of the most widely-used system fonts in the world, for Microsoft, he was also widely considered one of the best typographers in the world. Georgia is not hotel room wall art.
There are many laughably horrible attempts at fonts out there on free font sites (I remember my days learning to write software in the early 00s), sure. But there are also high quality professionally designed and typeset fonts available for free, including those of the system variety. The argument is comparing the latter to expensive designer fonts, not the former to high quality fonts.
Disagreeing with you doesn't mean I'm combative. (Not that I care)
> typography or design as disciplines that warrant serious thought.
We are talking about fonts here, more specifically fonts used in software, more specifically the quality of free fonts used in software. Not 'design' as a whole which is much more than that.
> System fonts are the absolute bottom of the barrel.
If you say so.
> You're associating your product with the ocean of amateur work on the internet, giving the impression you copy pasted a template.
Reusing a font means you're copy-pasting your article/app/etc from a template? Erm ok.
> There are some high quality free fonts typically backed by massive organizations with actual typographic expertise.
'Some'? Like 1000? 10000? How many fonts does one application need? 'typically'? How 'typically'? And I'm not being pedantic - your statements are pretty meaningless without actual numbers.
> Professional fonts are well designed at all weights, they're carefully spaced, they include much larger character sets to support more languages, contain features like lining and non-lining figures, variable font weights, small caps... are those all slight differences?
What is a 'Professional font'? lmao
Plenty of free fonts have all of the features you've listed, and plenty of non-free fonts don't.
> There’s a reason so many articles exist with titles like “Google Fonts That Don’t Suck”. Most of them do.
Again 'so many' and 'most'... you should provide specific (at least approximate) numbers, otherwise this says nothing about how many good free fonts are actually out there.
> Arguing that all design is BS is just lazy
Well I didn't say that, pretending that I did is pretty lazy tho.
> I highly recommend practicaltypography.com, a free web book that discusses all of this and more, including why system fonts are bad and why a professional typeface is worth paying for.
Oh geez! A FREE book which tells you why you should pay for 'professional' fonts while at the same time selling them to you with affiliate links! Thank you sir!
You should care if you're being combatative, but, even more importantly, quoting previous comments the way you're doing doesn't work well on HN and is also a flamewar trope. Everybody can read the comments you're responding to. Just refer back to them in prose. A single quote, maybe 2 in a long comment, fine, but what you're doing now creates the impression that you're sort of rebutting what the previous commenter said as you read them, sentence by sentence, which is a tell that you're not actually thinking about what they said.
Also: they're pretty clearly wrong, so you shouldn't need any of this to refute them.
I am rebutting what the previous commenter said, sentence by sentence (almost), I don't know why that tells you that I'm not actually thinking about what they said though. Did I misunderstand or misrepresent something they said?
I'm not going to argue with you, but I just want to point out that the person I was responding to specifically used the phrase "system supported fonts". That's why I mentioned Calibri.
> '..freely available and/or system supported fonts.'
Not just 'system supported fonts' (whatever that means), and not just Calibri. That's why your 'use Calibri for everything' example is absurd and does not at all address the point they made.
The last sentence is the variety that is super tempting to make but counterproductive because it shuts down discussion or poisons it thereafter its made to impress bystanders not actually communicate with the person.
Agree that it might not be the best, but seems like a fairly appropriate response for someone trying to back up their rhetoric with 'thousands of books out there'. How is it 'made to impress bystanders'?
Who cares? They're part of a line of argumentation that dunks on the typography work of Matthew Carter. This is very much the same thing as a thread on industrial design dunking on Dieter Rams. You don't get angry at that kind of argument; you laugh at it.
Oh I was never angry, I was enjoying the argument (maybe that makes me combative, oh well), and I was completely open to being proven wrong and thereby becoming more informed on the topic... alas...
Something tells me that some designers care about fonts a heck of a lot more than most consumers do. As a consumer, I care about legibility above all else. There are plenty of metrics that affect that, but many of the freely available (albeit, not necessarily free) fonts are perfectly fine on that front. More bluntly, some of those freely available fonts are going to be better than the vast majority of fonts that you can pay for because: (a) companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have invested in their development or licensing to ensure their customers have access to high quality fonts with coverage for most languages; and (b) they have wide availability, since font substitution is going to have a much larger impact upon the perceived quality of a document than its use of quality fonts.
Maybe this pedantic snobbery will matter again when we switch back to creative mode, but it all seems highly elitist right now while many are trying to just survive.
I admire your passion, but... as someone who is not deeply interested in fonts, I view them in largely functional terms. Can I read it? Does it look ok?
Programming language choice has an aesthetic side, but it is also very much a functional concern. Can I write secure code? Will it be performant? Will it be maintainable?
Different languages represent different functional tradeoffs. Are fonts really the same kind of thing? IOW, how would you make a choice between using Arial vs. Helvetica?
Arial v Helvetica is an interesting example, because Arial was designed basically as a cost-efficient alternative to Helvetica. So, the reason you'd choose between the two is exactly the thing the original comment was complaining about – licensing! They were designed to be metrically compatible... meaning, the character widths and spaces are exactly the same. This means that switching to Arial won't affect the layout of your document. This was more important when things were more analog, but it's still important with digital documents: for example, it could mess up the number of pages, which would affect meta content or create line breaks that seem meaningful but aren't. Additionally, having things like a widow (a word by itself on a new line) can disrupt the visual flow and draw focus to or away from content in ways you don't desire.
But just because those two typefaces are quite similar (and the reason to pick between them is largely financial/convenience) doesn't mean you'd never want to have more fine-grained control over the text you're working with.
You mentioned security. When I'm editing this comment, 0 and O are very different (the zero has a slash through it), however when I hit save they look quite similar. (But because we're all using system fonts on HN, it might be different for you). While it's often just a stylistic choice, in many situations the two characters would be indistinguishable and that would be an issue, which is why someone might choose a typeface where characters are significantly different. Think a password you have to transcribe.
If you know your font will be used in a quite small size, you may want one that is optimized for being read at tiny sizes. If you're displaying something technical, a monowidth font is better suited.
And all of this focused on utility for the most part; I'm leaving out all the reasons you'd want it for stylistic reasons. If you're trying to make people feel at ease, you may want typeface where the end of the strokes are rounded, for example. Sometimes you want people to feel a certain way, in the same way you modulate your tone when talking.
Very few system fonts are any good. Would you use Arial instead of Helvetica Neue? I certainly wouldn't. Put two posters side-by-side and you'd notice the Helvetica one as looking more professional, even without any design background.
Additionally, very few system fonts include all the weights. Fonts aren't just come in a single weight. The font you use for a giant page-filling title is generally skinnier than the font used for a caption.
Good design creates a reaction, such as causing you to buy something or interacting more with something or whatever, even for people that say they don't care about design.
An obviously false statement which you can't possibly back up.
> Would you use Arial instead of Helvetica Neue? I certainly wouldn't. Put two posters side-by-side and you'd notice the Helvetica one as looking more professional, even without any design background.
First of all that's just completely your own subjective opinion. Second, there are many other free sans-serif fonts out there to choose from (examples[1]).
> Good design creates a reaction, such as causing you to buy something or interacting more with something or whatever
'Design' can encompass many things, but can you show me some data that backs up your claim that slight differences in fonts will make a difference in product quality/performance/revenue/etc? Because I have seen a loooot of data that says it's almost always completely irrelevant.
This is just clearly wrong. Even Georgia and Verdana are very serious works of typography. The Cleartype fonts hold their own against modern text faces. San Francisco and New York are also obviously strong fonts. These are gigantic companies that take typography seriously, they can easily afford to invest in competent system fonts, and they both obviously have.
They updated it for the sequel, and one example doesn't nullify thousands of years of design.
But to go down that path from a logical standpoint... Papyrus isn't on my computer (OSX) for whatever reason, and it doesn't come on Linux. Papyrus isn't a free, public font... it's licensed by its owner (ITC), so the only reason you can use it on your computer is because someone is paying a license for you to see it.
I guess it comes down to how you view the concept of "the medium is the message". Should the tone be set by the creator of the software / writer of the blog post / etc, or should the end user choose one typeface for everything (or have fine-grained control over everything they read and view?)
I don't think this makes much sense as an argument, because you can have it either way with the status quo. The question isn't whether creators can use typesetting expressively; they clearly can, with a degree of freedom and optionality that would have blown me away when I started font nerding back in the 1990s. The question is whether I should sympathize with designers who are irritated by the licensing terms for Gotham or Brandon Grotesque (or whomever is doing per-impression licensing these days). I do not, and I think I'm on solid ground.
Yes, and no, but why and when? What makes any particular typeface more or less important had it been something different?
When I was younger and a bit more haughty about design, I would have agreed, but now I feel like I need more to substantiate the claim, even thought I feel like I agree.
> I'd argue that complaining about font prices is less like a Hermes bag, and more like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
This also needs a bit more. In what cases would some dish suffer "deeply" simply from having used commodity ingredients (a quality that's a core tenant in many famous designers' approaches)? You could more easily argue that something isn't the same as another, or perhaps less appealing visually, or perhaps less nutritionally dense, but it all seems a bit specious to me. Some cases would be significant, such as the choice of a garden tomato over a store tomato, but that's hardly a high-end concern, and why would high-end concerns be all that important anyway?
My opinion is that design is as important as the problems it solves or the outcome it produces, and the existence and selection of appropriate typefaces can be a core component in that, it would not be easy to make a strong value oriented argument for the discrete choice of one expensive typeface over another commodity typeface unless one evidently solves a problem better, or its value is already established because of the association with an existing identity that already uses it.
That's not to say they aren't worth paying for, or that licensing them isn't an issue, it's just kind of a debatable question how much one over another is worth or how important it is, much like art in general or other creative works.
Branding requires being distinctive, mixing novel visual and other aspects in a pleasing way.
As far as I have been able to tell no major platform ships with the universal font of fonts (full coverage of all possible fonts with 4.5Mb seed) “AnyStyleYouWant” font.
And none of the fonts they do ship have the “distinctive” feature.
Please keep your "branding" out of my UI. What I want from text in the apps I use is legibility first and foremost, not them screaming the brand at me every second I'm staring at them.
If you often use custom fonts that aren't preinstalled on typical systems, I can't help but wonder whether you also painstakingly choose fonts for non-latin character/non-latin based languages?
I'll admit opening a can of worms on purpose, but if you're going for the "high-end", ignoring the i18n implications seems like a crime on its own, and yet most people don't really have the design expertise to evaluate whether a font looks good in another totally foreign language...
Non-Latin? Well, OK, Greek and Cyrillic are close enough to Latin to be able to design the font for them following approximately the same style which apply to the Latin characters. You can make a Cyrillic Tahoma or a Greek Signika in line with the Latin variants. I'd say that this is the reasonable limit of non-latin support.
If you take Hebrew, Korean, Georgian, Armenian, Thai, hiragana, katakana, you're in trouble. They all have different proportions, traditions, connections. You can stylize them a bit to be reminiscent of the way the Latin font is made, but you'll have hard time making a Hebrew font with large serifs like Bodoni, and will have hard time making it materially different from Times New Roman in a convincing way. It's better to make a separate typeface.
Arabic / Persian / Urdu, or hanji are their own worlds altogether, hardly comparable to Western typography.
> Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
This heavily depends. As I mentioned before, cheaper materials did not always mean shittier, especially when it comes to cooking. Around here, healthy food is still cheaper (especially the ingredients) than junk food, although the recent increase in prices (of everything) is wild.
My problem with this analogy is that there are dozens if not hundreds of free typefaces that are exceptionally high quality and have stood the test of time.
The "problem" with free typefaces isn't their quality, it's their ubiquity. Since everyone can use them, they are used everywhere. Licensing something less common can help your product stand out from the crowd.
Or you could try implementing good features to try to stand out from the crowd.
Frankly, non-default fonts outside of the logo are a red flag to me. They signal a team that has put form so far over function that the function is almost guaranteed to not be fit for purpose.
There is a large number of free qualify fonts available at fonts.google.com, many of them are free for commercial use outside the web. There is also a handful of pretty good fonts not included in that collection but also freely available. (This is on top of good collections of fonts shipped with major OSes.)
There is a number of free fonts which are also free for commercial use, but are clearly inadequate for serious typographic work, or only contain highly stylized glyphs. They may still be perfectly usable for a game, or a mobile app which is not typography-heavy. In many cases, the shortcomings are only visible at paper resolution, or only in print as opposed to screen.
Then, there is a number of not very expensive fonts that cost $50-100 per face. If you really badly need a font exactly like that for a commercial project, and $200-300 is a prohibitively expensive for a permanent license you obtain, how much is the commercial project worth? Is it worth sweating over that very particular font?
If they're profoundly important for the design of your money-making app, the principle of "fuck you, pay me" applies. If you're making $50,000 every year and you couldn't do that without the design and you couldn't do the design without the font, pay up.
If they're profoundly important for the design of your free software app... we all know how likely it is for a free software app to have good design. You'd be the first.
The OP didn't say they didn't want to pay, they're saying there's been a shift toward per-impression pricing which is often unsustainable for even the most lucrative apps.
So, using the OP's own comparison, I should be able to pay a one off "saffron purchase", and then be able to use as much saffron as I want from the supermarket for every meal I ever make in the future? ;-)
No, because Saffron is a physical commodity with inherent production costs, supply chain logistics, and a finite supply. A better analogy would be that if you bought a saffron crocus, you shouldn't have to pay a monthly fee to harvest it.
This doesn't mean anything. Things are not generally sold at their bill of materials cost. If you don't want to pay what Monotype is charging, don't use Monotype faces. It's exactly that simple. There a gajillion alternative faces, and a very large number of them are of high quality.
To buy fonts you have to care about design but not too much. If you do then you'll draw your text so it's a unique "font" instead of buying a premade font that other people can also buy.
Almost every font, style, pattern, component used in any new app today has already been designed, implemented, redesigned and reimplemented 20 times over. 'The importance of design' and all of the associated rhetorical BS only really serve to keep redundant (imo) designers employed.
> like complaining about high-end ingredients when a supermarket has cheap stuff. Yes, you can get away with cheaper materials when cooking, but the final product will deeply suffer.
Can you actually make an objective argument for why certain fonts are more high-quality than existing free/open fonts, or how free/open fonts will make a product deeply suffer? I'd wager you can't.
I've worked closely with many designers behind some very popular 'nice' award-winning apps. I've listened to endless rhetorical BS about how 'this specific element of the design is incredibly important and any deviation is a major hit to the product quality'. These same designers very very rarely even notice when an incorrect font/color, styling/layout is used, while arguing that any such deviation will ruin customer trust destroy the app. Complete BS.
Part of the problem is that Monotype has a bit of a monopoly in the upper segment of the market though right? I know they're not the only players, but it feels like they've vacuumed up enough small, successful foundries that they now control enough of the market that they can get away with the kind of aggressive behavior that wouldn't be tenable in a healthier, more competitive marketplace.
From Wikipedia [0]
> Via acquisitions including Linotype GmbH, International Typeface Corporation, Bitstream, FontShop, URW, Hoefler & Co., Fontsmith, Fontworks [ja] and Colophon Foundry, the company has gained the rights to major font families including Helvetica, ITC Franklin Gothic, Optima, ITC Avant Garde, Palatino, FF DIN and Gotham. It also owns MyFonts, used by many independent font design studios.[3] The company is owned by HGGC, a private equity firm.
For those less familiar with them, those are BIG names, and the acquisition of them could perhaps aptly be compared, for instance, to Disney's acquisitions of properties like Lucasfilm and Marvel.
Serious question: who cares? There is no scarcity of high quality fonts (there are more of them available to ordinary people today than at any point in history). So they control Hoefler. If that's a problem for you, don't use Hoefler faces.
Independent foundries want to sell typefaces with reasonable royalty shares. Customers want trusted marketplaces (i.e. ones where scammers aren't reselling fonts they've pirated) where they can purchase high quality fonts with reasonable licensing for reasonable prices. Both customers and foundries are poorly served by Monotype monopolizing the big font marketplaces.
The Monotype monopoly is a legitimate problem that people have legitimate complaints about.
You're saying, exclusively, that Monotype is app-storing the market for fonts by buying up the common tooling designers use to transact in fonts, right? You don't care what Monotype charges for its own fonts?
(That seems like a perfectly reasonable complaint).
If Hermès did forbid me from carrying my (hypothetical) wallet more than 3 times a week, I simply would not buy that wallet. It would not become a moral crusade.
Why? Everybody can just not buy the wallet if they care about this term of use. Who's being harmed?
This isn't nitpicking. At some point you're really effectively just arguing that there should be a ceiling on what you can charge for a typeface. That's not an argument that respects the art and craft of type design; it's one that privileges convenience.
> Why? Everybody can just not buy the wallet if they care about this term of use. Who's being harmed?
Either because it's ridiculous and fun to laugh at, or to scare other companies off the idea, or both.
It being a luxury product that people can avoid is not a reason to keep my mouth shut.
> At some point you're really effectively just arguing that there should be a ceiling on what you can charge for a typeface. That's not an argument that respects the art and craft of type design; it's one that privileges convenience.
Okay, to switch back to typefaces, I don't get the impression they're complaining about the high end, I get the impression they're complaining about the average.
And if an entire class of product suddenly becomes luxury with onerous terms... that sucks! Do complain! It was working fine before!
But that clearly isn't happening. You have never had more access to high-end typefaces than you do today. What people are mad about is the licensing attached to --- literally --- the Hermès of type design. To get higher-level than the targets of these complaints you have to get into bespoke design.
This came up earlier in the thread, and I kept someone else on the hook on this: I honestly think that it would be a good thing for the world if font licensing got more onerous, not less. Type design is a very difficult field to make a living in, and the world could use more of it. The social cost of making high-end type more expensive is negative, not positive.
> What people are mad about is the licensing attached to --- literally --- the Hermès of type design.
Hmm, okay. If that's true then OP is just wrong.
The problem is this argument wasn't clear from your initial comment. You claimed that there were plenty of excellent free options, while they claimed that the market had generally gone to very onerous pricing. Both of those can be true at the same time.
But if most of the market hasn't done that, and they're only looking at the top, then okay they're wrong.
No, not a ceiling, but rather less baroque terms of use / price structure, I'd say. It's like licensing software per CPU core, and / or with a separate license with separate conditions for every of the two dozen components of software. These have been ridiculed because people who end up working with that get bothered and want to vent. Should not be a moral crusade though; a crusade to "liberate" someone else's property, as opposed to creating and maintaining something free, has a different name.
I don't know what a Hermès is or connotates, but I think the complaint is as much about the artificial and seemingly arbitrary restrictions as opposed to purely the price.
You can try to create a Veblen good out of a digital artifact and play the all or nothing game, but it's proven very hard to restrict something which can be copied at no cost and with no limitations.
When you buy expensive clothes, it would be silly for the seller to try and license them to be only worn on Mondays, or at dress-code events, or based on your taxable income. People are not going to take your "license" seriously, even if you'd have some legal grounds and might well win a legal argument.
I have a great deal of admiration for artists and designers, and I know that creating a multiple-variant typeface with great applicability that's either historically correct or truly innovative is an art form.
This reminds me of Napster-era debates about artists' rights versus distribution.
It’s not uncommon to require clients to develop a relationship with the retailer before they’re allowed to buy the more exclusive goods. It’s not the same as the licensing analogy but it’s close.
Imagine needing to spend 300% of an item’s cost at the retailer before you’re allowed the chance to buy the thing you actually want.
> When you buy expensive clothes, it would be silly for the seller to try and license them to be only worn on Mondays, or at dress-code events, or based on your taxable income. People are not going to take your "license" seriously, even if you'd have some legal grounds and might well win a legal argument.
That's why the usual approach, especially in this industry, is to not give people choice in the first place - this is achieved by renting, instead of selling.
Clothes as a Service is already a thing. A CaaS with excessively specific restriction of use? Might not be - yet. No doubt someone will try it.
The fonts loaded on one machine are typically not loaded reliably on all machines, so you need to distribute fonts with your application. Doing this is probably a violation of the license that all those "free fonts" were distributed under, so your only options are:
1. Public Domain Fonts
2. Fonts that cost money
The set of public domain fonts is pretty small and most of them are low quality - not all, thankfully - and out of the ones that don't suck a lot of them only support the latin character set.
As for fonts that cost money, just to give you one example, I recently asked a foundry what it would cost to license a font for my indie game. Their quote was $1100/yr with a ceiling of 300k copies sold (so I'd need to come back and pay them more on a yearly basis and the cost would go up if I was successful). This was only for 3 variants - regular, italic and medium - and only for the latin character set. For one typeface.
Certainly if I was throwing around millions of dollars I could pay that without blinking, but it's far out of reach for independent developers (and they know I'm independent)
Lots of games distribute "baked fonts", where the ttf/otf is statically rendered into a bunch of texture atlases and they ship the atlases instead of the font. Many font licenses I've seen don't permit this kind of use, so I suspect a lot of games are actually in violation of their font licenses, if they paid to license their fonts at all.
Hell, just the other day I prepared a PowerPoint presentation for work using one of the stock Office fonts and then I opened it in Office on another machine and the font was missing...
There is a large range of permissive licensing between public domain and "fonts that cost money". Free as in freedom Linux distros ship a sizable set of fonts, and I'm sure most of them are licensed permissively.
What? There's an endless supply of permissively licensed fonts, eg on Google Fonts. Many of them are actually pretty good. Yes, you'll find some bad ones too.
You should carefully check the license of each font on Google Fonts. They're not all under the same license. Yes, many of them are permissively licensed, but that doesn't mean you have the right to redistribute the ttf/otf file yourself as part of an application, since you need to comply with the terms of the license as it is written.
Ah, I thought they were all permissively licensed! Good to know. Can I at least distribute the woff2 of each?
Is there any common thing that I can do with all the Google fonts? I suppose I can at least look to them from a website? But not necessarily self-host?
I've been meaning to roll my own font with https://github.com/glyphr-studio/Glyphr-Studio-2 but I've never gotten around to it. Then you can build on top of the public domain fonts or properly license fonts on Google Fonts.
I feel like you're arguing against a point GP entirely didn't make. GP is saying there's a market mismatch here - there's money on the table that font makers are ignoring, and simultaneously apps end up using uglier default fonts. Both parties could benefit from meeting in the middle.
Do you consider fonts largely useless, overpriced and primarily directed at customers who seek to display status symbols? Because that's the analogy, I'm not sure I agree.
But the prices are off the charts, and it's the usual private-equity buying up the competition & their IP and then squeezing as much as they can. Not sure why that's worth rooting for.
Well if the same font could be independently discovered, would your view change at all? Of course at high resolutions this is unlikely but I feel like if I made the same image within 5 pixels wide and 9 pixels high and two colors as some font it might be accused of being similar, much like with some accusations in music.
In my experience part of the pain is having some decision-maker or stake-holder getting married to a design during the mockup phase. A lot of the mockup generators will use fonts you'll have to license later for free in the mockup.
There are very few fonts that exist in all the major platforms. But there are excellent free and open source fonts that you can use. I also want to point out that if you make an "app" and publish it on a platform like appstore, you are basically a slave to the platform.
I'd say the same about shows and movies, which is where the supermajority of this conversation is typically focused, especially given how much free content is over YouTube.
I guess you’ve never worked with one of those designers whose friend’s cofounder’s VC’s boyfriend shops at Neeman Marcus. Try telling one of them they have to use a normal legible tried and true font :s
> I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars.
The way this works is the design team picks some font, uses it on all of the design proposals, gets it approved by management, and then only later does a developer realize it’s a paid font they’ve been asked to put in the app. The teams want to avoid going back for design change approvals so eventually they just give up and pay the money.
It’s not developers picky boutique expensive fonts, in my experience. It’s the designers who don’t think about the consequences because by they point it’s off their plate.
To be fair though, there’s so many open source fonts out there of good quality that you don’t have to pay anyone to use their font. Why go against copyright laws when you can just use fonts like Roboto (or really, anything on Google Fonts) for free?
This maybe isn't relevant to your point, but the story in question is from long before mobile apps.
Also, just for anyone cruising the comments before reading the story, it is more about the "You wouldn't steal a car" PSA's from >20-ish years ago. I don't recall there being any explicit advocacy for font licensing anywhere in it.
As a mostly now digital designer I get it... but also realize that digital has the capacity to scale instantly where print doesnt. Want to get 40 million editions out digitally? Gimme a sec. Physically? Gonna need to get some investment capital and a few years ramp up.
By using a font that is guaranteed to be provided by the system on which the app is running. Both Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android all make such guarantees.
Linux DEs generally don't, but perhaps they should, given that open fonts with decent quality and extensive coverage are out there. Something like the Noto family.
And if you generate a set of bitmaps/sprites of individual glyphs from the font (e.g. to use as a bitmap font in a game), is that different to shipping an image with more specific uses of the font baked in, e.g. a logo/title image?
I haven't bought a ton of fonts, but iirc the licensing from US Graphics was pretty reasonable for software distribution. It was something like an extra $200 for app usage for an indie developer.
I've only purchased one font, which I use in my editor and terminal, so I don't have to worry much about the license. I can't be bothered to use custom fonts for any projects. With all the licensing considerations it just makes me cut out the whole idea to simplify my life.
Jokes aside, I'm not very impressed with this single color font art. Maybe in 30 years we will have 16 color fonts?
The color fonts currently work in Firefox and Edge, Safari support SBIX, Chrome on Android has CBDT
I can barely find a website that has an example. The ones I found have a few characters or a single sentence, very few fonts and they are not very pretty. Some of the implementations warn that the client might catch fire.
I researched it for Russia recently and apparently the law is much stricter about fonts here than in the US. Both the character shapes and the "code" are copyrightable so you ain't getting away with converting it into a different format either. Companies did get sued over this and did have to pay millions of rubles in fines and licensing fees for their past usage. Not sure about individuals but I wouldn't try my luck with any non-free fonts made by Russian designers.
I would suggest not pushing your luck with webfonts though, because in that case you are distributing the actual copyrighted "code" of the font, not just the minimally protected shapes that it outputs. There are services which crawl the web actively looking for pirated webfonts on behalf of foundries (and their lawyers).
I had this happen to a client and even though they had both the web and print licenses they were hit with a 50k suite because the font file was malformed somehow. I'm not sure how it shook out but I hope they didn't pay a god damn cent.
How robust is that identification? Does it just look for file hashes or identical character shapes? I imagine it is trivial to repackage a font file to break the hash fingerprint.
Interesting that nobody brought up Discord, who recently(-ish) changed the typeface for chat messages in favour of a worse alternative, allegedly to avoid licensing costs.
font licensing feels like it never caught up with how software actually gets made now. charging more for app use than for mass print always seemed backwards, especially when indie devs are scraping by and a font costs more than your backend. no wonder people end up using “free alternatives” without looking too hard at where they came from.
I am of the opinion that the licenses for fonts in software are too expensive, but why is the pricing ‘backwards’? Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.
> Book publishers don’t make a lot of profit, while software developers do.
Do you have a citation for that?
Printing a book costs just about nothing, it’s astonishingly cheap to print a quality book in volume. Author royalties are not that high (I suppose famous authors whose name alone sell books is another story), then you have retail margins and overhead.
The top three book publishers’ have sales in the low billions with operating margins in the 10 - 20% range.
It is a healthy industry even if it is smaller than it used to be.
The one problem with books is that shipping an individual book to a single consumer costs a far more than printing the book, but there is zero shipping and zero printing costs for ebooks, just the retailer margin.
Book publishing is at least as bad as VC work. You publish a lot of books to have a catalog, and a few books make inordinately more money than the rest which keeps the lights on. New printings sound cheap enough, but a lot of books don’t get many of those. The long tail is very flat.
And as for the authors, most would make a lot more money tutoring for the same number of hours of effort they put into the book. Those appearance fees might make it better, but how many people get those?
Please don't comment about the voting on comments.
Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit
There's plenty of readers with showdead set to Norway and that read and interact with downvoted comments. However if comments/articles get flagged then they get memory-holed.
If you need to discuss politics, then the easiest solution is to find another social media about the article - one that desires political comments.
I think that the suspension of due process in the home of Hacker News, the US, which was designed by its founders as a bastion of freedom from kings where people could pursue whatever their intellect desired with a guaranteed right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is important enough to merit discussion.
I think intellectual curiosity dies when due process dies, because if people can face arbitrary, excessive and (frankly) cruel punishment for thought crimes by the state, then what else is there?
Intellectually curious minds fled in the 1930s to the US when this happened in their nook of the world. And now, we're seeing the cycle repeat in their chosen nouveau homeland.
Comments that smell of defending to moderators are by definition poor comments. The crux of HN is to choose to write politely and intelligently. Any comment that could need defending shows poor judgement.
> bastion of freedom; kings; liberty; cruel punishment; thought crimes; 1930s
These are all fine intellectually stimulating things which I believe are critical to inform ourselves and others about. HN is not stopping you from discussing them. HN is not a jail. The request is that you discuss politics elsewhere: please just use other forums that welcome political discussion. Nobody is preventing you from doing that.
Disclaimer: those are just one users opinions (my own) on how things seem to work here. I'm most definitely ignorant about what the managers of HN think. I too have a deep interest in politics and civics and I too struggle with the HN guidelines. YMMV.
Mike Godwin repealing Godwin's Law as a negative factor I feel like apply.
That used to be a good healthy rule, because down voting didn't used to be a systematic cover vile land stealing masochistic genocidal deranged people. But now there's an asymmetric force where bad people are systematically able to deny access to topics they find inconvenient.
The rules are inadequate & the crimes of this world too deep.
If people are so slammed incovenienced by having to skip over a couple posts they personally don't want to read, then a) fuck them, they are not too incovenienced, b) get over yourselves you shitty fucks, c) stop providing covering for vast human rights violations, rampant murder and starvation of children.
These rules used to work well, because complaining about down voting was because there were shitty pissants who would actively downvotes everything on systemd, or everything on Kubernetes, or everything about JavaScript. Today's there's enough up votes to deal with the haters, and these topics actually get a fair shake without negative comments immediately dominating any submissions. But it just wasn't real stakes. The fact that we lost a couple years of these topics being overrun by monsters wasnt great, but no one really enjoyed the complaining about that status quo of shitlords always winning. Today though, I think there's a lot a lot a lot of people sick to hell of the information system here being totally lopsided, sick of not being able to discuss DOGE, DOGE's desire to fire everyone & replace us all with mechanized unaccountable decision making, sick of not being able to discuss Israel being an absolute monster beyond words. The downvoting and flagging is totally out of hand, totally unacceptable, and suppressing the very real topics of our day from being even somewhat visible and it's a gross injustice, that we should be hacking towards better on.
I don’t see any criticism of Israel per se in this article; it’s mostly about US’ 1st Amendment rights and due process.
As an outsider, especially as one who visited the US every quarter for over two decades, and was asked every time on the purpose of my weeklong trip, I see nothing wrong with the deportation of someone in violation of their visa requirements.
I also don’t see how foreigners (or “aliens” as US law seems to prefer) can claim protection under the US Constitution. If the latter does provide it, that’s great, but frankly it makes no sense to me.
As a visitor to a country I expect to follow that country’s laws, and not expect any privileges which are afforded to that country’s citizens.
Eventually, the Supreme Court extended these constitutional protections to all aliens within the United States, including those who entered unlawfully, declaring that "aliens who have once passed through our gates, even illegally, may be expelled only after proceedings conforming to traditional standards of fairness encompassed in due process of law." The Court reasoned that aliens physically present in the United States, regardless of their legal status, are recognized as "persons" guaranteed due process of law by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments
> I also don’t see how foreigners (or “aliens” as US law seems to prefer) can claim protection under the US Constitution. If the latter does provide it, that’s great, but frankly it makes no sense to me.
Everybody, including the country's citizens, are also expected to follow the country's law. If you come to the US and get mauled, as a non-citizen you have the right to the same protection as anybody else. If you are suspected of mauling someone, as a non-citizen you are afforded the same rights to a fair trial as citizens. If it was legal in the US to beat up a foreigner because they are not protected by the law, it wouldn't be very safe for you.
This is the rule of law [0] and is a really important concept in modern democracy. This is why foreigners on US soil can expect some protection by the laws of the country, of which the constitution is the foundation.
> As a visitor to a country I expect to follow that country’s laws, and not expect any privileges which are afforded to that country’s citizens.
Visas indeed have additional legal requirements, typically around rights to work or study. It is unlikely that a US visa would specifically restrict speech or protests (you are welcome to check this in your visas), and so it is the rule of law that applies.
In short, what is being disputed here is not that a foreign citizen was deported for violating the law, but that the deportation was decided by the executive branch of government, which is a breach of the separation of powers.
The response by the government is that it is legal for them to rescind any visa arbitrarily. This is currently being debated hotly in the US, and is essentially the background for this article.
