
The Sorry State of Native App Typography Licensing - idan
http://gazit.me/2012/12/19/mobile-app-typography.html
======
kanamekun
Couldn't agree more! That's why the open font movement is so exciting... some
of the fonts available are great:

* <http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/>

* <http://iginomarini.com/fell/the-revival-fonts/>

* <http://www.openfontlibrary.org/>

Open fonts are where open source was a decade or so ago... but the trend is
already clear.

~~~
tptacek
There are a few decent open fonts now (and then a whole lot of novelty display
faces, and a fair number of knockoffs), but it is unlikely that the "open font
movement" is going to displace H+FJ or the like any time soon. As Andrew
points out downthread, creating a complete set of hinted fonts for a face is
tremendously expensive and time consuming, and for the people with the
resources to devote time mastering the craft, there's a functioning market for
the work.

~~~
Silhouette
_There are a few decent open fonts now (and then a whole lot of novelty
display faces, and a fair number of knockoffs), but it is unlikely that the
"open font movement" is going to displace H+FJ or the like any time soon._

That's an unfortunate example. H&FJ do excellent work, but a lot of people
simply can't use it (legally, at least) because of their archaic licensing.
You can't use their fonts on the web with @font-face. You can't even embed
them in PDFs you're going to distribute, without paying for some mysterious
extension to the standard licence.

They displaced themselves from those markets, and given that there are now
some free web fonts available that are very good by any standards, I suspect
H&FJ will never establish themselves in that market in the way they could
have. Perhaps from a commercial point of view it doesn't matter to them, if
their focus is the high-end, money-no-object-for-our-brand customers that I
suspect they rely on for the bulk of their revenues. If you count people like
the President of the United States among your customers, I imagine that makes
up for quite a few Joe Webmasters.

~~~
tptacek
They are clearly crying themselves to sleep on their pillows stuffed with
hundred dollar bills.

~~~
Silhouette
Maybe they are or maybe they aren't. It doesn't change the fact that they have
kept themselves out of the low-mid range font market through their deliberate
choices about pricing and licensing. The "open font movement" doesn't need to
displace H&FJ, because H&FJ were never the incumbent.

~~~
tptacek
This is a fake argument. Who's contesting that H+FJ has "kept themselves out
of the low-mid range font market"? Of course they're doing that.

~~~
Silhouette
Then unless we're talking about some sort of high-end native apps that are
going to want to license H&FJ fonts because the open, screen-optimised fonts
already available are somehow inferior, what was your original point again?

~~~
tptacek
That the open fonts people point to tend to be inferior to those of H+FJ or
FF, and that H+FJ doesn't seem to care much that you can't use their fonts on
your terms.

~~~
Silhouette
The thing is, for on-screen use, that simply isn't true. Good screen-optimised
fonts, including the better free ones like Open Sans or Source Sans, will blow
almost any standard font from almost any major foundry out of the water right
now if the application is on-screen web or native apps.

The strengths of good screen fonts (i.e., hinting) are very different to the
strengths of high-end pro font families from the big foundries (subtle
details, comprehensive range of weights, big character sets, and so on).

The sad thing is that even those foundries who _have_ made some attempt to
port their popular fonts to a screen format, typically for use as web fonts,
have produced very poor results more often than not. (Don't believe me? Go
visit any trendy web design blog that uses Typekit, and then disable Typekit
and read the same text in a dedicated screen font like Calibri or Verdana, and
tell me which one really looks better.) I attribute that directly to the fact
that they haven't invested the same effort in those screen fonts that they
might invest in a "full" font, which in turn is presumably because they don't
expect any extra quality to make much difference to how much money they make,
which in turn is probably because they're segmenting the market into "rich"
and "freeloaders" and mostly ignoring the middle ground who might make better
screen fonts a profitable endeavour.

Until that changes, I'll take something like Open Sans or Source Sans over
anything in the H&FJ collection for use in a web or native app, thanks -- not
least because H&FJ still don't seem to have converted their fonts and made
them available for web use at all. I sometimes wonder how their high-end
clients who demand consistent high-end branding feel about that.

~~~
tptacek
We disagree. But by all means, go ahead and keep using Open Sans. It's a
competently executed font that will make you look like you care about as much
about flashy typesetting as Google does. Which is my point.

~~~
Silhouette
Well, it is certainly a more competently executed font than anything from
H&FJ, because _they don't have any screen-optimised web fonts available yet_.

And while I respect your right to disagree, I do not appreciate your
implications about the quality of my typographical work. I know that the price
I pay for posting under a pseudonym is being unable to defend myself by
showing actual work I've produced, but to those who know who I am and the kind
of work I produce professionally in real life, right now you're probably
looking a bit like I would if I started lecturing you about how it's bad
practice to store the raw version of passwords so you should XOR everything
with a randomly selected byte for security.

~~~
tptacek
Yes, they do; they just aren't generally available on open terms. Kottke's
blog uses (used?) an H+FJ web font.

I don't even follow your second graf. "Your typographical work"? What would
that be? If I'd seen it and commented on it, your comment would make more
sense.

~~~
Silhouette
_Yes, they do; they just aren't generally available on open terms._

Well then I come back to my original point: H&FJ is an unfortunate example to
compare with open fonts, because they have already excluded themselves from
the markets we are talking about in this HN discussion.

 _If I'd seen it and commented on it, your comment would make more sense._

Your previous statement "[Open Sans is] a competently executed font that will
make you look like you care about as much about flashy typesetting as Google
does" came across as a not very subtle insult, as if anyone using Open Sans
can't typeset anything more interesting with it than a big white space with a
couple of words and a text box in the middle. If that wasn't what you intended
then I withdraw my comment.

------
shardling
_Desktop and webfont pricing [for fontspring] is identical, but appfonts are
ten times the price!_

I think the blogger made a mistake here: desktop licenses are per 5 users, web
licenses are per 500k page views, but app licenses seem to be for any number.
The app license even explicitly states

 _b. Licensee may embed the Font into an unlimited number of copies of the
App._

(As a tangential aside, why the heck does HN still not have a syntax for
blockquoting!?)

~~~
tptacek
Another potential difference might be that most (not all) webfont licensing
situations involve content that is controlled entirely by the licensee, but
app licenses might frequently involve scenarios where the licensee's customers
control the content. For instance, Instapaper has effectively obtained a
license for typesetting pretty much everything on the Internet in FF Meta.

------
Hupo
There's lots of great free-for-commercial-usage typefaces out there. If you
don't already have Fontsquirrel[1] (who also has a fantastic @font-face
generator[2]) bookmarked, you should fix that immediately. Google Web Fonts[3]
is also another (obvious) resource.

[1] <http://www.fontsquirrel.com/>

[2] <http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator>

[3] <http://www.google.com/webfonts>

Also, while I'm at it, I guess I could name some typefaces I've grown quite
fond of: Alegreya, Aller, Cabin, Delicious, Fontin Sans, Lato, Open Sans, PT
Sans, Puritan, Quattrocento Sans, Rosario, Source Sans Pro, Ubuntu. All great
stuff!

------
tptacek
It is hard to imagine something that is _less_ of a "commodity" than a high-
end designer font. Literally everyone in the world with a computer or
smartphone has numerous highly serviceable fonts at their disposal; if you're
looking to license a designer font, the sole rational reason you'd be doing it
is to _de-commoditize_ your typesetting.

------
apaprocki
I'd just like to point out that it costs upwards of $1 million USD to design
and implement a serious Unicode font from scratch (full TT hinting, all
styles/weights, multiple glyph sets). So keep that in mind when referring to
licensing fees. The license cost compared to the cost of production is very,
very small.

~~~
antoncohen
Can you help me understand that cost?

I'm having trouble imagining 10 people getting paid $100k/year, working full-
time for a year on a font. The Ubuntu font family is a _serious_ font, it
includes 13 fonts covering 1200 glyphes and 200-250 languages. It took about a
year to develop. While 10 people might have worked on it in total, it would
have been done in phases, not 10 people for a full year. Maybe Canonical did
pay a million dollars... did they?

~~~
apaprocki
The Ubuntu font includes Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic glyphs. The website says
Arabic and Hebrew are TBA. Then you have other glyphs such as Thai, not to
mention CJK. You're assuming 10ppl/$100k, but the company also needs to make a
profit. The font work is usually done in phases, obviously delivering base
Latin first and other glyphs/weights are added later. I can't speak to how
detailed the hinting is in the Ubuntu font, but that requires lots of tedious
work if you need to be able to display/render the font at very small font
sizes.

edit: Wikipedia also contains this regarding Dalton Maag, the foundry which
created the Ubuntu font:

"In July 2012 the Rio 2016 Olympic Games released their brand font created by
Dalton Maag. It was based on the letters and numbers within the logo already
created by Brazilian design agency, Tátil.[11] The typeface took eight months
to create and comprises 5448 characters. The design work was mainly done by
Dalton Maag’s Brazilian office, which worked with the London team during the
font engineering stage, and also with Brazilian consultant Gustavo Soares, who
worked as the technical interface between Dalton Maag and the Rio 2016 team."

There's an example of a typeface built over 8 months using two teams in two
countries.

------
hcarvalhoalves
Let me fix the title:

"The Sorry State of Typography Licensing"

It has always been, and will continue to be, a pain, because the foundries
have the same mindset as recording labels, movie studios, etc.

~~~
tptacek
Yes: that their work, which is simultaneously an incredibly time consuming
craft _and_ a luxury good that nobody can reasonably claim a native
entitlement to, deserves to be remunerated at rates that the market sets.

~~~
Silhouette
That's a dubious argument.

For one thing, much of the market sets the rate for top quality fonts at $0,
just as it did with music before legal download sites killed off the $20+ CD
album with three good tracks and a dozen fillers.

On a personal note, I do value good quality typography in various professional
and occasionally even personal work, and I do spend my own hard-earned money
to buy the fonts I use legally. However, I have certainly paid less than I
would have, because even as a typophile willing to open his wallet, now that
I've got a few really good choices available, any further purchases are
luxuries.

One of my companies recently bought some fonts for branding purposes.
Initially we bought three from a family that we were fairly sure we wanted.
Happy with the results of our initial design work, we went back a few weeks
later to find the foundry had hiked up prices to nearly double their previous
rate. Instead of completing the set for future-proofing purposes, we just
walked away and made do with what we already had. And we didn't hire the web
fonts at all, we just created some PNGs in Photoshop for key branding
graphics, and use good, free web fonts for the rest.

If we could pay $20 for a real web font licence (not some renewable/pay per
view/pay per server/other junk) or $100 for a whole family, then I imagine
we'd be buying new stuff every time we ran a themed campaign on our site. At
closer to $100 for a single font and $1,000+ for a serious family without even
getting a web licence thrown in, it's just not worth it. It's the 21st
century, and we have the Internet now. Maybe foundries that want to make a
good return on all their hard work need to think less like the movie/music
dinosaurs and more like Apple and Valve.

~~~
tptacek
No, the "market" does not set the "rate" for "top quality fonts" at "$0". When
people take commercial services without paying for them, that's not a market
function. All the work that goes into trying to make people not honor
contracts is deadweight loss.

As you know, the "thing you refer to as the market but isn't" also doesn't set
the rate for top quality fonts at $0. By all means, pirate fonts for your
meaningless project that nobody will ever see or give a shit about. But if
that project ever goes anywhere, it's pretty hard to hide the fact that you
stole FF Meta or H+FJ Vitesse or Chaparral. You'll just get sued, and you'll
lose. Fonts are not like music. People steal music for private enjoyment and
primarily get caught when they redistribute their stolen tracks. That's not
what happens with fonts.

~~~
Silhouette
_You'll just get sued, and you'll lose._

I think you are wildly overestimating the odds of being successfully sued for
ripping off a font.

And black markets generally arise precisely when the official market isn't
working effectively. You can deny reality or work with it, but for most of us
changing it because we don't like it isn't an option.

~~~
tptacek
No, you're underestimating the risk, because the risk of being sued is dwarfed
by the risk of projects simply failing.

Risks like these --- along with not incorporating, mishandling your capital
structure, working without contracts, &c --- are the most pernicious startups
have to reason about, because they only sting in the unlikely case that you
actually succeed. As a result, they're easy to discount. Unfortunately, when
you do that, you end up counterfeiting your success, because it's only when
you actually get your break that you realize you've made the mistake.

If you're knowingly wasting your life on projects that you don't expect to
come to fruition, by all means, steal the fonts you use to promote them with.
You have bigger problems than the font police.

~~~
Silhouette
People rip off fonts _all the time_ , and many of them do it for major
commercial projects.

As someone who does pay for fonts legally, and who makes his own living
creating knowledge works, I find this intensely annoying.

But I've still never heard of a single project being undermined or seen anyone
suddenly change their branding as a result of a lawsuit about font usage
rights. For a start, if the font is being used to generate graphics or for
anything in print rather than embedded electronically, you'd have a tough time
proving any kind of infringement in jurisdictions where the design of a font
isn't subject to protection.

Frankly, I don't believe that most small type foundries have the will, the
time or the money to go after anything but large-scale, flagrant infringement
anyway, any more than my company would realistically go after a client who
didn't pay a small invoice. Whatever protection the law theoretically affords,
in practice the overhead of exercising your rights are greater than the
benefit you stand to gain by doing so. Pragmatically, your best bet is not to
work with people who are likely to rip you off, which you can do by working
with nicer people or by reducing the incentive for less nice people to screw
you over.

~~~
tptacek
Point me to a project you think (a) lots of people would have paid attention
to and (b) is using typefaces that they haven't bothered licensing.

~~~
Silhouette
Are you serious? Half the design agencies in the universe seem to have a
massive stock of fonts that they once bought for one project (if that) and
never deleted, copied onto their servers where any of their designers can use
them for any new project, with little if any control or auditing going on.

You claim that there is a bogeyman out there who will come and sue infringers,
but it seems to me that this is the rare exception rather than the rule.
Ironically, the last case I heard about was HADOPI, the French anti-piracy
watchdog, which got caught with its pants down almost immediately over the
font it was using for its logo.

You seem to be living in this HN dream world where all projects are high-value
and all clients are high payers. If you want to argue that font licensing
works effectively in that market, sure, maybe it does. But most of the design
world isn't like that, and the current copyright/licensing regime for fonts is
doing precious little to promote their use in the rest of the industry.

~~~
tptacek
That is exactly what I'm arguing: that font licensing works effectively for
the high-value projects the foundries target. And if you don't think what
you're building has the _potential_ to be high-value, why are you working on
it?

You don't seem to get it: it is a perfectly sane business decision to choose
your client base. Most of the foundries haven't chosen "random web apps".
They're probably smart to make that decision, given the fact that most of the
people who make "random web apps" don't really value typography. How I know
that is, they bitch loudly over pricing that is a tiny fraction of what the
foundries real customers routinely pay.

~~~
Silhouette
_That is exactly what I'm arguing: that font licensing works effectively for
the high-value projects the foundries target._

Well, OK, I'm not disputing that. But this discussion isn't about those high-
value projects, it's about using fonts in native apps.

 _And if you don't think what you're building has the potential to be high-
value, why are you working on it?_

Because not every project in the world has to be Google or Facebook. I think
your definition of high-value is probably a lot higher than what many people
would consider a successful project, assuming the project is even being done
for profit in the first place.

 _You don't seem to get it: it is a perfectly sane business decision to choose
your client base._

I get that just fine. It's just that you seem to be the only person in this
entire discussion who is talking almost exclusively about high-end projects,
while the rest of us seem to be generally agreeing that the current state of
type licensing is not helpful for anywhere below high-end.

~~~
tptacek
You're beating a straw man. I'm not saying you have to be shooting to be the
next Google.

~~~
Silhouette
But your entire argument seems to be that font licensing is working just fine
for high-value, high-end customers.

The rest of us are talking about what is holding back typography in apps and
how the current licensing regime isn't promoting the use of better fonts in
that context. It's right there in the title of the discussion.

~~~
tptacek
In your world, there are two kinds of companies: those so small that nobody
will notice when they commit torts, and those of Google's scale.

~~~
Silhouette
Obviously that's completely different to what I wrote.

That said, there are hundreds of thousands of apps out there right now. Unless
you think someone from each major foundry is checking every one of them to
make sure they're not infringing, it is self-evident that there are very many
companies so small that nobody will notice if they infringe the copyright on a
font or two.

It happens all the time, when creating apps, in professional design work at
studios, when creating content in-house, etc. Pretending otherwise is like
pretending software doesn't get pirated by small businesses all the time,
completely unrealistic. You might not have to be Google's scale to get
noticed, but I expect the vast majority of people working professionally with
fonts could use any extra ones they downloaded illegally with complete
impunity. But every time they do, that's probably a failure of the market to
generate some revenue for whoever created that font.

------
shiven
Love Open Fonts!

Wrote my doctoral thesis[0] in LaTeX, typeset in Gentium Plus and other Open
SIL fonts[1].

[0] <http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/gsbs_diss/562/>

[1] <http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=Gentium>

------
garrickvanburen
This is a huge reason why I currently only use and only recommend using openly
licensed fonts (OFL, Apache, etc). The state of openly licensed fonts has
significantly improved in the past 3 years.

------
darknoon
I've been bitten by this licensing problem many times. For some beautiful
well-known fonts, fees can be in the 10s of thousands of dollars if you want
multiple weights….

------
tblancpain
The author is correct that app licensing is in its infancy, just like webfonts
licensing was completely unstructured a few years ago.

Constructing this as some sort of malicious action of foundries is quite far
from the truth, though.

In the fairy land of foundries, there's the great and unrivaled king –
Monotype – and then there's a thousand princelings with a few princes (Adobe,
FontFont) sparkled in between.

Type is a TINY market. In a back of the envelope calculation last year, I
found that the whole type industry is generating around $120m – $150m in sales
every year. Monotype/Linotype is around $50m of that pie already. Adobe Type
is another $20m is I recall correctly. FontFont is a private company but I
take their overall revenue is something like $10m.

Most other foundries are 2 men operations that produce a small profit but not
enough to make huge technological investments like hand-hinting the complete
back catalog.

At that point a foundry has three options:

1) Not offer their catalog for web- and app licensing at all. The respected
resellers / foundry VLLG (Village, <http://vllg.com>) does this currently, for
example.

2) Offer them on request, with the possibility of having a conversation with
the customer about their expectations and what they're really getting for
their money. See the note in the sidebar on
<http://commercialtype.com/typefaces/atlas> as an example for this.

3) Offer them no matter what rendering quality on Windows devices they can
achieve.

While horrible Windows rendering this does not apply to mobile app licensing
due to better rendering engines and high-resolution displays on most current
devices, it's still a large effort for most small foundries. Setting up the
products in the e-commerce backend is the smallest part of that. And all that
effort is a bet on (currently) a very small possible return.

And last but not least, one thing to understand is that most foundries make a
huge percentage (60%+) of their money licensing large volumes to bigger
companies. One corporate design may include office fonts for 500 workstations.
While I personally love selling to small studios and startups that love our
work, it's not what pays the bills.

------
heddhunter
I just went through this exact situation a few days ago. The designer of the
app chose Avenir, which is included in iOS 6 but is not part of Android, so I
reached out to Linotype to find out how to license it for an Android app. The
responses were confusing and inexact (and slow - apparently they only have
sales staff in Germany, and I'm in California, so the time difference means
every go round takes a whole day). After 2-3 email exchanges I gave up trying
to get a coherent answer and we're using a bundled-with-Android font. Oh well!

------
DieBuche
You have to consider that it's trivially easy to extract the full fonts from
the app the enduser receives. For iOS just unzip the .ipa file, go to the
Resources folder et voilà.

~~~
madewulf
I thought that too might prevent foundries to license their fonts, but it
turns out that services like typekit are in fact already putting these fonts
online, without any real guarantee against pirating. It's just not very
convenient to do right now, but definitely doable, as stated by typekit
themselves : [http://blog.typekit.com/2009/07/21/serving-and-protecting-
fo...](http://blog.typekit.com/2009/07/21/serving-and-protecting-fonts-on-the-
web/)

So, if foundries are allowing that on the web, why the special treatment in
native apps? That is one of the points of the article.

------
typicons
_Still, having to inquire about the price of something that my brain perceives
as a commodity is jarring._

Love this line.

<http://www.youworkforthem.com> offers licensing for mobile apps at checkout.
Interestingly, the price difference between eBook and mobile app is the same.

