4/23/2025 at 8:11:49 PM
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to mobile app development, I one day realized that all the fonts I bought for print are now worthless to me.These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price.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.
by phony-account
4/23/2025 at 9:34:12 PM
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.by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 8:50:11 AM
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.
by readbeard
4/24/2025 at 4:17:01 PM
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.by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 8:52:02 PM
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.
by ummonk
4/24/2025 at 9:30:48 PM
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).
by tptacek
4/23/2025 at 10:03:23 PM
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.
by gkoberger
4/23/2025 at 10:44:31 PM
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.
by lolinder
4/23/2025 at 10:55:47 PM
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.by gkoberger
4/23/2025 at 11:07:33 PM
op isn't saying you shouldn't complain. op is saying you shouldn't steal instead of complainingby gobengo
4/23/2025 at 11:13:42 PM
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.
by gkoberger
4/24/2025 at 2:01:57 AM
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.by dcow
4/24/2025 at 4:53:58 AM
Then why are the fonts so expensive?by behringer
4/24/2025 at 6:03:19 AM
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.by ghaff
4/24/2025 at 9:13:01 AM
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.
by biercarsten
4/24/2025 at 12:47:46 PM
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.by ghaff
4/24/2025 at 12:08:55 PM
USED to be a website? Aww, I did pretty well there - going to miss it.by mark-r
4/24/2025 at 9:02:19 PM
No idea which one it was but I found this one and got a perfect score. The difference is pretty obvious... https://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/index.phpby ummonk
4/24/2025 at 9:35:34 PM
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.
by imiric
4/25/2025 at 12:48:21 AM
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.by ummonk
4/24/2025 at 8:41:09 AM
> Then why are the fonts so expensive?Because they're considered important, and definitely take a long time to make. Try making one.
by robertlagrant
4/24/2025 at 12:05:49 PM
Not to mention that it's almost impossible to make a living designing fonts.by mark-r
4/24/2025 at 12:38:05 PM
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?
by pc86
4/26/2025 at 6:07:30 AM
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."by behringer
4/24/2025 at 8:23:09 AM
Market segmentationby immibis
4/23/2025 at 11:14:04 PM
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.by tptacek
4/23/2025 at 11:17:35 PM
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.by gkoberger
4/23/2025 at 11:19:30 PM
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)
by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 12:27:36 AM
I usually like your takes, but where I disagree today is when you say: "Truffles have a functional role in a dish." but fonts don't.Either both do have functional roles or both are luxuries like Hermès.
by bravura
4/24/2025 at 1:25:48 AM
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.
by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 1:32:36 PM
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?by int_19h
4/24/2025 at 2:27:45 AM
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).by davidivadavid
4/24/2025 at 2:31:07 AM
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).
by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 2:44:49 AM
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.by davidivadavid
4/24/2025 at 2:57:42 AM
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.
by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 9:57:35 AM
> 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.
by KronisLV
4/24/2025 at 2:54:44 AM
His argument is about body typefaces, not wordmarks at all, so yes this is talking past based on a different definition of "functional".by Dylan16807
4/23/2025 at 11:31:43 PM
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.
by gkoberger
4/24/2025 at 1:46:04 AM
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.
by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 1:49:25 AM
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.by gkoberger
4/24/2025 at 1:55:56 AM
I may just be more comfortable disagreeing than you are! It's certainly not personal.by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 12:45:32 AM
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.
by aeturnum
4/24/2025 at 1:40:38 AM
> A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role in a document100% 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.
by vunderba
4/24/2025 at 1:43:02 AM
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.by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 1:46:20 AM
Ah that's my bad, I read the first statement without seeing that you prefaced it with "as compared to free alternatives".by vunderba
4/24/2025 at 1:56:40 AM
Sorry for coming at you that hard, it just felt like a gotcha. But we both misread each other!by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 1:55:48 PM
One dyslexia font was tested and found to have the same legibility as normal fonts:"Dyslexie font neither benefits nor impedes the reading process of children with and without dyslexia."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11881-017-0154-6
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.)
by mrob
4/24/2025 at 9:35:43 AM
> Truffles have a functional role in a dishCheap "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.
by close04
4/24/2025 at 9:54:05 AM
Not without adding fatby casey2
4/25/2025 at 8:19:13 AM
> A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role in a document, compared to the high-quality freely-available alternatives.https://practicaltypography.com/why-does-typography-matter.h...
by xigoi
4/24/2025 at 7:55:07 PM
The truffle, and the font, add _essence_by butlike
4/24/2025 at 11:44:42 AM
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.So we are back at what OP said.
by bdelmas
4/24/2025 at 12:33:45 PM
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.
by pc86
4/24/2025 at 3:40:42 PM
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.
by bdelmas
4/24/2025 at 7:27:29 PM
Maybe it won't sink the business, but prices were bad enough for IBM to cough up the money to grow their own truffles (of IBM Plex variety).by homebrewer
4/24/2025 at 3:06:41 AM
Where’s the car in this analogy?by mlx0x
4/24/2025 at 5:29:45 AM
How would you get away with the stolen truffles?by setopt
4/24/2025 at 2:59:39 PM
[flagged]by ototoForward
4/23/2025 at 11:11:20 PM
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.)
by derefr
4/23/2025 at 11:49:55 PM
I don’t particularly like the analogy, but love cherry tomatoes. Grape tomatoes are such a blight on this world. Kind of like Arial is to Helvetica.I would never steal a cherry tomato, but will reject a grape tomato at any chance I get.
by jonhohle
4/24/2025 at 1:46:25 AM
I can't figure out how to download your comment. (Written in a serif font textarea which will show up as a generic arial)by notarealllama
4/24/2025 at 12:16:13 AM
[dead]by efeamzaov
4/23/2025 at 10:16:17 PM
There are roughly zero apps out there that would ”deeply suffer” from having to use freely available and/or system supported fonts.by fmbb
4/23/2025 at 10:21:53 PM
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.
by gkoberger
4/23/2025 at 11:05:21 PM
How is using some of the thousands of freely available fonts out there even remotely the same as using Calibri for everything?You're making absurd comparisons and not being sincere.
by wubrr
4/23/2025 at 11:11:02 PM
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.
by gkoberger
4/23/2025 at 11:24:55 PM
> 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?
by wubrr
4/24/2025 at 1:56:34 AM
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.
by rondini
4/24/2025 at 2:06:26 AM
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.
by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 7:11:36 AM
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.
by dwaite
4/24/2025 at 4:51:41 PM
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.by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 2:17:19 AM
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.by dcow
4/24/2025 at 2:18:41 AM
> You’ve been combative throughout this threadDisagreeing 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!
by wubrr
4/24/2025 at 2:37:49 AM
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.
by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 3:28:36 AM
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?by wubrr
4/24/2025 at 8:51:57 AM
Going against someone is not the same as rebutting, the quality of the argument counts.by gpvos
4/24/2025 at 6:18:38 PM
Because it’s easy to respond to one-off sentences. It’s harder to respond to the substantial argument they make.by dcow
4/25/2025 at 4:39:38 PM
What substantial argument?by wubrr
4/23/2025 at 11:37:28 PM
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.by gkoberger
4/23/2025 at 11:43:47 PM
No, what the person you responded to said was:> '..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.
by wubrr
4/24/2025 at 1:24:50 AM
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.by michaelmrose
4/24/2025 at 2:25:39 AM
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'?by wubrr
4/24/2025 at 2:44:04 AM
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.by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 3:24:55 AM
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...by wubrr
4/24/2025 at 12:44:13 AM
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.by II2II
4/24/2025 at 2:33:37 PM
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.by joquarky
4/23/2025 at 10:34:23 PM
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?
by shermantanktop
4/23/2025 at 10:49:08 PM
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.
by gkoberger
4/23/2025 at 11:26:14 PM
Yes. Arial is bad. But Microsoft shifted away from Arial more than 20 years ago.by tptacek
4/23/2025 at 10:45:19 PM
>You think games would feel as immersive if everything was Calibri?What computer are you buying that only has one font? There are dozens of fonts, covering all kinds of styles, on every desktop sold.
by jeremyjh
4/23/2025 at 11:07:04 PM
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.
Designers know you better than you know yourself.
by vFunct
4/23/2025 at 11:19:38 PM
> Very few system fonts are any good.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.
[1] https://fonts.google.com/?categoryFilters=Sans+Serif:%2FSans...
by wubrr
4/24/2025 at 12:03:32 AM
Apple has been shipping systems with various weights of Helvetica Neue forever. https://developer.apple.com/fonts/system-fonts/by jonhohle
4/23/2025 at 11:25:29 PM
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.by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 1:27:38 AM
Yes: I think games would be approximately as immersive as they are now if everything was set in Calibri. Also: Calibri is a very, very good typeface.by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 6:52:22 AM
>That's not true at all.What specific iOS apps would suffer greatly by having to use the ~75 font families that come with the device? How would they suffer exactly?
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/List_of_fonts_included_with...
by jrflowers
4/23/2025 at 10:35:02 PM
Avatar was pretty immersive! And they just did Select-All and chose Papyrus!by nogridbag
4/23/2025 at 10:40:04 PM
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.
by gkoberger
4/24/2025 at 1:34:45 AM
I don't have a strong opinion here. I was only making a silly reference to the SNL skit :)by nogridbag
4/23/2025 at 11:08:07 PM
There are literally thousands of free font out there available for download.by wubrr
4/23/2025 at 10:46:29 PM
Is your point weakened by the fact that there is not one freely available font to use commercially, but literally thousands?by IncreasePosts
4/23/2025 at 10:52:02 PM
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?)by gkoberger
4/24/2025 at 1:32:44 AM
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.by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 12:37:03 AM
If Avatar can use Papyrus, I think your apps are fine with common fonts.by Mistletoe
4/24/2025 at 2:27:44 PM
Seriously. It amazes me what one person's sense of "deep suffering" is compared to another's.The Total Perspective Vortex comes to mind.
by joquarky
4/24/2025 at 1:13:38 AM
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.
by brailsafe
4/23/2025 at 10:15:50 PM
Modern included fonts aren’t that bad. It’s more like using tomato sauce instead of fancy handmade chilli.Your meal doesn’t deeply suffer, it’s just a bit bland.
by Aeolun
4/23/2025 at 10:43:55 PM
And importantly... Just like with food, the overwhelming majority of people will not notice at all.Even trained wine tasters can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine reliably.
Normal people can't even tell what flavor of skittle they are eating without the visual color cue.
by hattmall
4/23/2025 at 10:42:38 PM
Branding is very important.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.
Until that day comes…
by Nevermark
4/24/2025 at 1:38:12 PM
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.by int_19h
4/24/2025 at 5:16:24 AM
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...
by hnfong
4/24/2025 at 5:43:57 AM
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.
by nine_k
4/24/2025 at 5:40:09 AM
> 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.
by johnisgood
4/24/2025 at 6:04:55 AM
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?
by nine_k
4/23/2025 at 10:32:04 PM
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.
by babypuncher
4/23/2025 at 11:16:22 PM
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.
by moron4hire
4/24/2025 at 8:22:35 AM
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.
by immibis
4/24/2025 at 2:01:51 AM
I guess if they are so important we should be paying for them. Not that you argue against it per se, but in discussion context.by cgio
4/23/2025 at 10:42:15 PM
So "Typefaces are incredibly important", just not important enough to pay for (or create yourself)???by bigiain
4/23/2025 at 10:57:34 PM
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.by gkoberger
4/24/2025 at 12:48:14 AM
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? ;-)by bigiain
4/24/2025 at 1:12:24 AM
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.by gkoberger
4/24/2025 at 1:35:41 AM
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.by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 2:22:54 PM
> Things are not generally sold at their bill of materials costIn a perfectly competitive market things are sold at cost of production + a small markup.
by graemep
4/24/2025 at 5:31:02 PM
Do you understand what a perfectly competitive market is? Typefaces structurally cannot be one.by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 4:02:43 AM
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.by hiccuphippo
4/24/2025 at 2:26:35 AM
> Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for centuries.Is there hard statistical evidence for this?
by fooker
4/23/2025 at 10:58:40 PM
> misunderstanding the importance of designAlmost 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.
by wubrr
4/24/2025 at 4:06:55 AM
[flagged]by smcameron
4/24/2025 at 8:58:18 AM
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.
by wvh
4/24/2025 at 10:09:41 AM
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.
by llbeansandrice
4/24/2025 at 10:12:21 AM
> 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.
by TeMPOraL
4/23/2025 at 10:32:28 PM
Hermes doesn't forbid you from wearing your watch or charge 10x more for you to wear it while playing a mobile game.I think a lot of the anger is more about the complexity and price discrimination than the absolute price.
by AlchemistCamp
4/24/2025 at 1:36:24 AM
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.by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 3:03:33 AM
But they'd deserve to be mocked in public. Complaining about something is usually not an attempt to make a moral crusade.by Dylan16807
4/24/2025 at 3:17:03 AM
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.
by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 3:20:29 AM
> 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!
by Dylan16807
4/24/2025 at 3:27:31 AM
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.
by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 3:38:13 AM
> 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.
by Dylan16807
4/24/2025 at 6:15:50 AM
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.by nine_k
4/23/2025 at 11:36:20 PM
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...
by kevingadd
4/24/2025 at 8:31:00 AM
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.by badmintonbaseba
4/24/2025 at 12:22:48 PM
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.by tasuki
4/24/2025 at 1:02:35 PM
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.by abirch
4/25/2025 at 6:29:38 PM
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.by kevingadd
4/25/2025 at 8:12:07 PM
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?
by tasuki
4/24/2025 at 1:49:58 AM
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.by rendaw
4/24/2025 at 1:51:27 AM
I agree except for the "piracy would be less of a problem" thing.by tptacek
4/23/2025 at 10:56:24 PM
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.
by luckylion
4/23/2025 at 11:27:03 PM
Hermès sells a $5000 wallet.by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 7:54:27 PM
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.by butlike
4/24/2025 at 1:10:58 AM
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.by benatkin
4/24/2025 at 9:19:11 AM
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.by z3t4
4/24/2025 at 4:23:40 AM
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.by threatofrain
4/24/2025 at 4:24:10 AM
I do believe that about shows and movies and have argued that point here in the past, but it's especially true of typefaces.by tptacek
4/24/2025 at 1:58:05 AM
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 :sby dcow
4/24/2025 at 3:01:36 PM
[flagged]by ototoForward
4/24/2025 at 1:36:21 AM
> 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.
by Aurornis
4/24/2025 at 1:43:24 AM
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?by odo1242
4/24/2025 at 5:15:47 AM
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 cut3
4/23/2025 at 10:17:55 PM
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.
by nativeit
4/23/2025 at 8:55:47 PM
And god forbid you to accidently ship the font with your game or mobile app! :)by zeroq
4/23/2025 at 9:53:23 PM
How does one even use a font in an app without shipping it with the app? In a logo or something?by grishka
4/24/2025 at 1:43:00 PM
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.
by int_19h
4/23/2025 at 10:10:34 PM
You can trace it, I guess...by tecleandor
4/24/2025 at 11:05:44 AM
What if you convert it to bitmap, instead of shipping a TTF/WOFF/etc? Does it still counts as shipping the font... or not?by whstl
4/24/2025 at 4:42:33 PM
No, because a font is licensed as a computer program that generates those glyphs. The glyphs themselves aren’t copyrightable.by trinix912
4/24/2025 at 11:42:14 AM
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?by bluescrn
4/26/2025 at 3:38:07 AM
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.by Chaosvex
4/23/2025 at 8:34:35 PM
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.by wyager
4/24/2025 at 4:38:43 PM
Why not just use free fonts? There are so many available that are perfectly good for most use-cases.by glitchc
4/24/2025 at 7:59:44 PM
I really good font is a fine work of craftsmanship that is time consuming to make. The type designer deserves compensation for their work.There are also plenty of license free, and B-tier fonts available if you are on a tight budget.
by thordenmark
4/25/2025 at 2:50:01 PM
I work in this industry, relatively new to it. There is a mind numbing amount of work that goes into font engineering.by viggity
4/23/2025 at 10:00:16 PM
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.by al_borland
4/24/2025 at 3:03:02 AM
Send in the LLMs!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'm not impressed.
Some random examples of the state of the art.
by econ
4/23/2025 at 8:50:22 PM
In general, AFAIK, the general assumption is every font is absurdly easy to steal, and that you'll do so before purchasing it.So it's de facto "free unlimited trial, free for personal use, pay for business if you have a soul and shame"
by refulgentis
4/23/2025 at 9:57:23 PM
Depends on the country.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.
by grishka
4/24/2025 at 12:19:42 AM
> I wouldn't try my luck with any non-free fonts made by Russian designers.Depends if your home country cares about Russian civil court or not.
by BeFlatXIII
4/24/2025 at 2:34:06 AM
Huh, this is interesting. Given that Russia has been the hub of internet piracy for theast three decades.by fooker
4/24/2025 at 3:15:51 AM
That's because copyright in Russia is only enforced for companies. If you pirate something for personal use, no one would care, thankfully.by grishka
4/23/2025 at 8:59:05 PM
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).by jsheard
4/24/2025 at 10:59:37 AM
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.by SoMomentary
4/23/2025 at 10:28:02 PM
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.by 0cf8612b2e1e
4/23/2025 at 9:31:18 PM
Got a link to such a service?by lifesaverluke
4/23/2025 at 9:32:47 PM
https://www.fontradar.com is one. They also claim to analyze apps somehow.by jsheard
4/23/2025 at 11:04:56 PM
[dead]by floriankarsten
4/23/2025 at 11:08:26 PM
[dead]by floriankarsten
4/24/2025 at 12:48:01 PM
Legally they’re software so yeah it’s the same as licensing a proprietary piece of code.by whywhywhywhy
4/23/2025 at 10:18:35 PM
I only purchase fonts for graphic design projects (mostly branding). For UIs I'm perfectly happy with Google Fonts.by pier25
4/23/2025 at 8:49:42 PM
A diffusion model for fonts. Isn't it time they get ripped off too? /SARCASMby SubiculumCode
4/23/2025 at 8:56:40 PM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43776539by SubiculumCode
4/23/2025 at 8:26:32 PM
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.by lgiordano_notte
4/23/2025 at 8:37:59 PM
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.by nickff
4/23/2025 at 8:57:25 PM
> 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.
by teruakohatu
4/23/2025 at 10:22:21 PM
Short answer: Nobody fucking knows because the accounting is more non-GAAP than your typical investment fraud house.A few spots for folks interested in some amount of numbers:
https://slate.com/culture/2024/04/book-sales-publishing-indu...
by indrora
4/23/2025 at 9:06:33 PM
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?
by hinkley
4/23/2025 at 11:26:11 PM
[dead]by floriankarsten
4/23/2025 at 9:16:20 PM
> while software developers do.Ouch!
What is wrong with me then?
by worik
4/24/2025 at 9:28:47 AM
[dead]by floriankarsten
4/23/2025 at 8:31:59 PM
Whatever the answer, I would caution you to listen carefully to the most product / marketing centric person who dares speak up.Font licensing feels like God tier product marketing.
by gorgoiler