Comment by phony-account
1 day ago
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These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price.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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_Imaging
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.
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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.
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There are roughly zero apps out there that would ”deeply suffer” from having to use freely available and/or system supported fonts.
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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.
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...
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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.
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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?
> 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.
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.
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.
So "Typefaces are incredibly important", just not important enough to pay for (or create yourself)???
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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.
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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.
> Typefaces are incredibly important, and have been for centuries.
Is there hard statistical evidence for this?
> misunderstanding the importance of design
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
I agree except for the "piracy would be less of a problem" thing.
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 do believe that about shows and movies and have argued that point here in the past, but it's especially true of typefaces.
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.
Hermès sells a $5000 wallet.
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.
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.
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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
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> 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?
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.
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.
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.
And god forbid you to accidently ship the font with your game or mobile app! :)
How does one even use a font in an app without shipping it with the app? In a logo or something?
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.
You can trace it, I guess...
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Why not just use free fonts? There are so many available that are perfectly good for most use-cases.
Legally they’re software so yeah it’s the same as licensing a proprietary piece of code.
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.
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.
https://www.throwup.it/en/artists/mars/
I only purchase fonts for graphic design projects (mostly branding). For UIs I'm perfectly happy with Google Fonts.
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.
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"
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.
> 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.
Huh, this is interesting. Given that Russia has been the hub of internet piracy for theast three decades.
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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.
Got a link to such a service?
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A diffusion model for fonts. Isn't it time they get ripped off too? /SARCASM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43776539
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.
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> while software developers do.
Ouch!
What is wrong with me then?
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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.