Today, most fonts in practical use are open source fonts. When someone chooses a font for a web project, they typically pick something from Google fonts, which are all open source licensed. Android, the most common OS, uses open source fonts like Roboto by default which are also open source.
The article does not mention open source at all, it has one mention of Google Fonts which is kinda misleading ("the latter of which gives away fonts for free" - well, not really, many of these fonts are not from google and were already free, google is just providing a font hosting service).
An accurate statement would be one company dominates the proprietary font market, which is however only a small share of overall font use.
This is not true. We would have to define "practical use" but if you are looking at most used typefaces - things people see in around them the most it is dominated by commercial typefaces. It will be Helveticas, Arials, Times New Romans of the world. What people use in Word and Windows - all proprietary typefaces. Anything Apple - proprietary. Anything branded - brands usually typeface and that typeface is going to be proprietary - even on web.
Only platform that uses open-source typeface is Android with roboto/noto. If you are looking at webapps not marketing sites then yes you might get lot of Inter but trend is moving towards using system-ui font stack which is proprietary (except linux/android).
So no open-source typefaces are definitely not most used in practical use. Btw majority of the super popular ones are owned by Monotype the company this article is about.
The graphic designers I know all own a personal library of expensive fonts they’ve purchased over the years. Fonts being good matters a lot more than them being free
Really good free fonts are as rare as unicorns. One can spot good fonts by looking at the kerning, and most if not all free fonts suck at kerning, including Google Fonts.
> things people see in around them the most it is dominated by commercial typefaces
I agree, but I think that says more about how the market for OS-software evolved (with the assumption that the OS should provide core fonts "for free") as opposed to an indication of monopoly or lock-in.
The average person probably doesn't notice (nor care) about the subtle differences between those major (OS-company supplied) fonts versus open-source equivalents or their competitors' proprietary ones.
And quite franky, all of them would laugh in your face if you told them that fonts are something that ought to be provided "for free". Fonts come from designers, designers work hard and should be paid for their work. Accordingly, real professional designers pay for fonts -- by the hundreds or thousands, sometimes, so many fonts their computers slow down if they don't use special software to manage them all.
This is also why the strongest, healthiest software ecosystem exists on macOS. Because macOS still has that cultural creative core of its user base, a culture which believes that people who create things should be paid for their efforts. Accordingly, you can still release a commercial proprietary program on macOS and expect to make significant money -- even from a small user base. That's certainly not true on Linux and it increasingly isn't true on Windows -- except, maybe, for gaming.
As for the average person, we're not even talking about the digital world. Everything in print, everything written on television, uses fonts. And if they employ professional designers, those are going to be commercial fonts. The real deal, the ones that were first set in hot type by Swiss or Austrian guys a hundred years ago or more. Open source substitutes are no substitute at all.
> [designers] would laugh in your face if you told them that fonts are something that ought to be provided "for free"
That's a big *whoosh* or else you just felt like attacking a strawman.
Like I already said, I'm referring to how all major operating systems (including desktop Linux distros) bundle dozens of fonts to cover common needs. No average consumer is expected to spend additional money gaining the ability to see Greek math symbols or pseudo-handwriting or whatever.
It isn't the 1990s where you might see a retail-display box for Microsoft Windows 3.x adjacent to Microsoft TrueType Font Pack for Windows and Adobe Type Basics.
Similarly, disk-defragmentation tools are now in there "for free", and a TCP/IP stack is there "for free", etc.
Well yes, but in era of reproducible science, we need fonts which can be reproduced by the people who recompile the scientific data and regenerate the reports. Proprietary fonts are kind of a bottleneck in that respect.
> Today, most fonts in practical use are open source fonts. When someone chooses a font for a web project,
I think you've got your HN blinders on. There are two types of projects: Projects where the font doesn't matter, and projects where the font is proprietary. Proprietary fonts utterly dominate the market whenever there's a paid graphic designer involved.
You seem to think all open-source fonts' graphic designers worked for free, which is as laughable as saying there is no money in open-source software development.
Most fonts in wide use are likely contract work, whatever license ends up being used for their distribution.
In the industry of big near-monopolies, let’s support small indie type designers. I personally can’t recommend enough Matthew Butterick’s work, for example. The price is not prohibitive, the license is easy to understand, while fonts are very well made and receive occasional free updates.
My experience with commercial fonts is not great: I have had PragmataPro in my wishlist for a decade. I then bought it, to discover, for some reason, KDE doesn't render it correctly and it's twice as bold as it should be. In GTK4 apps it is decent, but everywhere else it is not the same look of the official screenshots.
Same with Berkeley Mono, which I got the free trial version and it is a little blurry in Emacs, that kind of peculiar blurriness of fonts that have never been tested on other OSes. Most fonts are perfect on Linux, so those commercial ones might require some tweaks to be compatible with other engines, and I don't see any font designer taking the time to test on Linux.
So while I would want to support indie font designers, because of my "weird" environment, I should probably stick to the free ones that I can just swap out if they don't render correctly.
It sucks to have spent €150 for a font that doesn't render well. I don't want to ask for a refund because it might one day work on my system and ages ago I used the pirated version, which incidentally worked just fine on Linux at the time.
(Before anyone mentions my font stack is broken, I assure you it ain't, and it the closest to macOS': hidpi monitor, 2x scaling, grayscale aa, no hinting. Everything looks gorgeous, except those two commercial fonts)
> I have had PragmataPro in my wishlist for a decade. […] KDE doesn't render it correctly and it's twice as bold as it should be. In GTK4 apps it is decent, but everywhere else it is not the same look of the official screenshots.
The typeface designer can't fix broken/inconsistent OS rendering. Still, I would've asked for a refund so the creator is aware and could avoid other potential customers.
Yes. If you ever find yourself buying a webfont for your latest website or logo, always see if you can buy it direct from the designer. Monotype takes a huge (like >50%) cut if I remember correctly.
I bought Berkeley Mono largely for that reason. First, it's a great font that I love using. Second, it's a passion project from a small shop that cares a whole awful lot for the work and doing it right.
Berkeley Mono looks good and fairly priced (for personal development), and I like that they offer both ligature and ligature-free versions. Might add to my collection.
MB is not just a knowledgeable about typography and fonts, he also published his online book using his own software he built in Racket. Definitely a true hacker!
It's not Iosevka (really, what else can come close except maybe Envy Code R), but I have recently discovered Victor Mono and think it an attractive programming font: https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/
Not OP, but I like PragmataPro [0] by Fabrizio Schiavi and use it in my IDEs. I particularly appreciate his attention to glyphs in languages other than English, and how nice it looks (IMO) for console interfaces and box drawing [1].
You'd have to ask Fabrizio. I assume desktop is the cheapest because it's just you, and app/website is more expensive because there's some nontrivial risk you expose the font files in a way that others can get them for free.
I used his Triplicate monospace font as my main IDE/terminal driver for about a year, and I think in a couple of logo sketches. His other fonts look good as well, if I get to do more visual design again I might get some of them too.
this is a great and virtuous cycle, to name and do business with small publishers and artisans (!)
reality check - do not expect to survive financially yourself in the tornado of modernity without a small niche to fit somewhere and security from elsewhere
How come these old typefaces like Helvetica and Gill Sans not in the public domain? The article mentions Helvetica being rolled in with one of Monotype’s purchases yet Helvetica is from the 1940s?
Hard copies of Shakespeare have individual copyright because of their unique prefaces. Are these typefaces in copyright still because of the individual numerical descriptions being the work under protection, rather than the actual shape?
Is it something similar to
How X’s recording of Bach’s Y concerto with The Z Ensemble is in copyright, but the musical score itself is in the public domain?
It looks like[0] as of the start of this year, only works made in 1927 or earlier are in the public domain. Copyright terms have regularly been extended by Congress and they are astoundingly long now.
> Copyright terms have regularly been extended by Congress and they are astoundingly long now.
There has been no appetite for extending terms in recent years, and things are entering the public domain again, including _Steamboat Willie_. I think there is an understanding that the CTEA will end up as the final extension and that further extensions are unlikely.
I have a suspicion that this is why steamboat willy has been in the Disney intro for the last few years - so it can be a trademark (which don't have expiry dates)
Sonny gets blame for the copyright extension act, but Cher's royalties lawsuit is not unreasonable or copying rights related... or did I misunderstand or miss something?
Because you're not buying Helvetica, but a digital variant of it. It's like a performance of classical music. Also Helvetica specifically is from 1957, so it may not in the public domain yet (depending on location).
There are actually several variants all named Helvetica, which is why it's a really bad font to put into your CSS font stack if you're not delivering it yourself. Newer variants tend to use other names (e.g. Neue Haas Grotesk).
The font files themselves are copyrighted. The underlying typeface --- the shapes of the letters themselves --- are not, so you could I suppose draw your own Helvetica. But you wouldn't be able to call it "Helvetica", because that's a trademark.
I've still never entirely understood why nobody's written a program to rasterize paid fonts at 10000 dpi and then run the bitmap through an automatic vectorization tool to create a legally free and redistributable version that is visually indistinguishable from the original (literally off by rounding errors).
The only thing missing would be hinting, but on retina displays and modern laser printers that's much less important than it used to be -- and you can always implement automatic hinting. And it's easy to extract kerning pairs as well.
I'm not saying this would be good for font creators or society. I'm just wondering why it hasn't become a common thing, when it doesn't seem like it's actually illegal.
(2) You'd get sued anyways and then have to explain to a jury the distinction between your vectorized raster and the original vectors --- I agree that a graphical interpretation of, effectively, a photograph of a curve is not the same thing as that curve, but it's a subtle point.
(3) Most importantly: it just doesn't matter enough. Universally "important" fonts (Helvetica, say) have widely-used liberally-licensed alternatives, but if you want Hoefler Whitney, you want the real Hoefler Whitney, for the same non-pragmatic reason that you'd want a real pair of D&G Daymasters.
Optifonts was doing something similar to that in the 90s. The results were generally mediocre to bad, but they were going for volume. I've used them in print for headlines and decorative fonts because you can adjust them manually until it looks pretty good. Both the backstory and the fonts are pretty interesting:
Thanks! That's exactly what I thought someone would have started a business to do. Glad to know it was actually tried.
If the results were bad then, I can't help but think they'd be far better now. I have to assume automatic vectorization is now much improved since the 90's.
Font's aren't quite just a collection of images. Though they almost are which makes it hard to see the boundaries.
But a computer font (as opposed to the typeface it represents) is a specialized program, ie it has logic as well as data. Specifically, kerning tables and the conditions under which to use ligatures would be lost by the approach you're proposing. But I'm not a typographer or font expert and I suspect other things also. Anyway that doesn't make it completely untenable, just not a complete & automatic process.
It is similar in concept to how recipes are handled by intellectual property law. A list of ingredients isn't protected, nor is a specific result. But a list plus instructions is. You can copy a recipe by applying a different set of instructions to the same list of ingredients, resulting in an identical dish. In this the type characters are the ingredients, but you still need to provide a set of instructions to combine them into a font. You can provide ones that create an identical result, but you can't simply copy them from the original font.
I agree that you're not going to use this approach to make a clone of Zapfino, for example.
But for 99% of fonts it's going to work fine. Kerning tables should be easy to recreate simply by rendering all pairs of characters and measuring the resulting width. And there are only a handful of common ligatures (ff, fi, etc.).
But absolutely, there's a small percentage of fonts with more advanced features that would be harder/prohibitive to reproduce this way.
Excluding font designs from copyright protection is a USA-specific thing. What you describe might be restricted by IP laws in other jurisdictions so doing it commercially could be dicey.
Sure, but doing it commercially in the USA would be the point. Although IP laws are awfully aligned internationally by this point -- I wonder if there are differences in protections for typefaces?
To specify about your Shakespeare example, the hard copies are most definitely not under copyright as a whole. At least in the US, only the new, copyrightable material in them can be copyrighted. If it is not novel enough to be copyrightable on its own (like page numbers, titles, etc), it can't be copyrighted.
Frankly there are a lot of things that people and companies claim copyright on, and other people pay them for, that are not legally under copyright at all. But it is survival of the richest out there...
It appears as though the real problem is address near the end of the article under a heading that has nothing to do it: Monotype is switching to a subscription model that will likely weigh strongly in their own favor, and there is little that anyone can do about it since they are essentially a monopoly.
Most of that was buried under a heading about AI.
While the handful of sentences addressing AI were dismissive, my initial thoughts were directed towards the opening paragraphs of the article. They were describing a case where the creator received $12 in royalties for a font used in a major film. The irony is the font emulated handwriting, which is the sort of font that would benefit from all too human variation even if that human variation is emulated by a machine (e.g. using AI).
Making a font from one's own handwriting is an intriguing experience even if you don't go for cursive.
I decided I wanted my own (rather idiosyncratic) handwriting to use in some training materials, and an evening spent with a cheap and cheerful iPad app gained me a font to use for labels and captions. It's slightly eerie to see it.
It was absolutely ages ago now, it might not still be around (I have a feeling it is one of the apps that didn't make it to 64 bit iOS).
Can't remember if it did ligatures.
I will look through my purchases shortly and edit this/comment again...
Edit: it was iFontMaker. And it's still around! I might have to have another go with this, because I last used it so long ago that I was using one of those rubber-tipped Wacom passive stylus things...
This is, frankly, why one should approach all the "why should you use commercial, licensed fonts?" blog posts with a jaded eye.
There are so many "they may have missing glyphs", "free fonts may breach copyright", "there's no support" stories. And they amount to FUD from blog sites that don't talk openly about being on commission from commercial exchanges.
If you want great results on a website in particular, you could use a system font stack (which is often kinder on your users) or a common readable open font for body text, and then consider paying a brand designer with experience designing fonts to design a caption/headline typeface paired with it just for your own use. Or you could pair a system font with an existing font from an indie designer that does not use a font-serving CDN or have per-view licensing rules.
But there are high quality fonts in Google fonts that you can easily extract (the Create Block Theme plugin for Wordpress will now install Google fonts locally) and there are font-pairing tools that can help you make good decisions.
This is one of those things that has just moved on. There are so many ways to do this that don't involve stolen fonts.
There are plenty of excellent open source fonts with full glyph support and perfect kerning etc. But many are overused. If you use something like Raleway or other popular fonts, visitors will have a subconscious sense of familiarity and associations which you may or may not like. If you want something distinctive it's hard to avoid commercial fonts.
Or you can just assume that distinctive letter shapes are not a problem you need to go out of your way to solve, and move on with your life, right?
I think it's good to remember that there is a species of online person call "the font nerd" (I know because I am one and have font nerd friends), and font nerds would very much like it to be important to select interesting type combinations, and many are not above rationalizing urgencies for that hobby. But I doubt anybody in the real world actually cares. Look at the site we're on!
A wide variety of people in the real world -- designers, brand designers, accessibility designers, book publishers, teachers, avid readers -- absolutely care about this.
I am often surprised by how much considered opinion non-professionals have about font choices, about readability etc.
The site we're on: I don't think we are going to agree that this is the real world... ;-)
(Ask anyone with dyslexia about typefaces and they can tell you a lot about what they like and don't like. Tell them about typefaces designed with dyslexia in mind and they may love you forever. I totally changed someone's life by introducing her to OpenDyslexic.)
So: professional font nerds care. And there are pathologically bad choices to make that make pages unreadable to people with reading difficulties. I think my argument admits both of those amendments without really bending all that much.
I think I listed a broad enough constituency to rebut that claim. But I would agree that bad font choices (as well as bad colour contrasts) are a significant downside of all the flexibility.
Are you saying professional designers don't care about this stuff?
I'm a developer with front-end skills; I've spent a lot of time around professional designers for 27 years and I usually implement people's style guides.
(I'm also a photographer, which should disqualify me from claiming to be an artist)
We could argue for purely functional, utilitarian priorities. But it seems a large fraction of humanity is very susceptible to form over function. Pretending that I think this is testable, I would wager that most people who "care" about fonts in the general population are driven by the same fashion mechanisms as in clothing and other product consumption.
And I don't mean that they have to be aware they are bound like this... many are driven subconsciously by fashion concerns even when they construct other rationalization for their preferences. Humans are intensely social and can turn nearly any kind of visible behavior or marking into a social signal.
A very small number might actually be concerned with actual usability/human factors of fonts, but most are in it for the tribal aspects of associating font usage with other "brand" or tribal identities. For the amateur producers, this can lead to cargo-cult emulation of the producers they admire. Even dissent here can fall into the same trap---consider how many times you've seen a LaTex document from a student who wants to be an author of a computer science paper, but doesn't really have anything to say (yet?)...
Don't get me wrong. As I said, I'm a font nerd. My old blog has fonts I paid actual money for, which was otherwise exchangeable for goods and services in the real world.
I like fonts. I get why people like fonts. I just don't think they matter.
Now, if Computer Modern was an important professional signal, and it was the case that Monotype owned its copyright and rapaciously charged for its use, that would matter quite a bit. But that's not the case; ironically, the one font we can think of that has professional implications is under an open license.
There is a battery of commonly-used fonts (the Microsoft fonts, we might as well call them) that are professionally important. But they're also universally available; they argue against the idea that font licensing is all that meaningful, as well.
> If you want something distinctive it's hard to avoid commercial fonts.
I get what you mean -- Lobster is everywhere in the summer, and it is cute but now noticeably cheap.
But again I tend towards thinking that this is an over-egged pudding, because truly distinctive commercial fonts are as likely to have negative associations, surely? Unless you're buying something that nobody else uses, and that has the same support issues as these blogs try to scare people with.
If you want something truly distinctive, you can pay for someone to make a font suite for you, and you can consider your own needs.
The BBC have for example been transitioning their sites for years over to their "Reith" font family, which has enhanced readability and rather fewer confusable pairs. ITV (the original and largest commercial TV channel in the UK) has their own typeface, "Reem", which is rather nice work (classier than most of their TV content).
A pragmatic approach for many producers would be to pick a well-considered open-licensed sans or serif face and get a font designer to produce something distinctive (that need not be a truly complete face) to pair with it for captions, logotype, alternates etc.
>There are plenty of excellent open source fonts with full glyph support and perfect kerning etc.
that's not the problem, the problem is that there are 100x as many which are not excellent, have terrible kerning, etc. and sorting between them is really time consuming. Not to mention the category of "90% of the way there" knockoffs where you can't (because you're not an expert) tell till later that you're working with something really lame. If you're not a graphic designer, it's really difficult to navigate.
(and don't read that as an endorsement of graphic designers, hire those and you've just added a lot of form bathwater, out from which the function baby will be thrown :)
I've never really thought about this. Perhaps I missed it from the article and maybe this is a dumb question but is there a font that is truly open source, royalty free and recognized / built-in to browsers? Is there such a thing as a royalty free font family that the popular browsers would all recognize by name? Could that even become a legal battle?
Monotype owns most major fonts: Arial, Helvetica, Gotham, Times New Roman.
font-family:Open Sans,Arial
font-family:monospace
If I use any of those in HTML can someone claim royalties on my text? Should this concept itself become a font family? e.g. font-family:royalty-free and let the client decide on their favorites royalty-free fonts?
No. The OS platforms have broad system licences for those fonts; your readers will also have those licences.
The royalty is being paid in the OS licence attached to the viewer's computer, basically.
There are meta-font-families for system fonts, and you can effectively use "monospace", "serif", and "sans serif" and the system is going to choose the typeface that best meets those requirements.
Some Linux users buy themselves whatever fonts they like, e.g. from one of the many on-line stores.
Most Linux users use only free fonts, some of which are metrically equivalent with the more popular Windows fonts, so they will substitute those in documents and Web pages.
Some Linux users, like also some of the users of other operating systems, may use unlicensed copies of some popular fonts.
Most of those fonts donated by Microsoft are only among the fonts owned by Microsoft, e.g. Georgia and Verdana.
They have included only a few fonts licensed from Monotype, e.g. Arial.
Besides the fonts donated by Microsoft, there are many other free fonts that have been donated by big companies like Google, Adobe, Intel, URW, Bitstream, JetBrains and others.
There are also many free fonts donated by individual creators.
You are right that perhaps the word "donate" is not the most appropriate, because for typefaces, like for programs, the author does not normally transfer ownership but only grants certain rights for using the typeface.
By "donate" I have meant that the typeface owners have forsaken the revenues corresponding to the licensing fees that they have stopped demanding, allowing the free use of those typefaces. It can be said that they have donated the value of the work that was needed to create those typefaces.
You are also right that now this Corefonts package is mostly of historical interest, because the included fonts are very old. Unlike these, the corresponding Windows fonts have been maintained, by fixing bugs and adding new Unicode characters.
Interesting. That has activated more questions in my noggin. Now I am more curious than anything how much each of the OS and browser vendors are paying in royalties. Beyond that of course there are browser forks usually managed by a handful of developers volunteering their time. Are those forks a legal ticking time bomb? I would be surprised if they strip out the code for the non system fonts.
Those are still out there because the licence for those specific files remains legitimate, though a 21 year old typeface is not necessarily a useful thing anymore.
That package was used as the basis of "nonfree" packages in various distributions, that would download the MS archive file and unpack/install it.
I also wonder about how much Monotype charges Microsoft.
Ubuntu of course paid for their own system faces to be designed (which I like but not enough to use on my desktop). And Firefox has its own core font family (Fira), for example, that it can use in its own products as an alternate (I think it was designed for the late not-much-lamented Firefox OS)
Answered elsewhere I think. But basically there are open source fonts now (Roboto, Open Sans, Liberation, Adobe's Source family) as well as distinctive fonts like Ubuntu, and a legacy way to get the core fonts.
Linux can (with quite a bit of pain) use font alternatives to swap in Liberation Sans for Arial or whatever (at least I assume that is what is happening)
> Is there such a thing as a royalty free font family that the popular browsers would all recognize by name?
Yes "Liberation Fonts" [0]
> [...] compatible with the most popular fonts on the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office software package (Monotype Corporation's Arial, Arial Narrow, Times New Roman and Courier New, respectively), for which Liberation is intended as a free substitute.
The more I think about this and based on the really good answers to my silly question it feels like there is a giant gap here. Feels... It feels like there should be a universally open source, royalty free sans-like and monospace-like font that has been optimized for screen readers for vision impaired as well as developers to spend hours/days coding in and contributed to the internet for all devices to use. I have no evidence to back this up, it's just a feeling.
Not a font to download or embed but rather a set of fonts that is already embedded in all the things so anyone could just reference it. So in CSS something like:
Rather than providing a URL to download the fonts, everything already has the fonts preinstalled. OS, IoT, toasters, cars, phones. All the things. Surely there must be a set of highly artistic altruistic people that might wish to contribute such a thing to humanity.
No because the point of system fonts is that whoever made your operating system has already paid the license fee to be able to render text using that typeface.
Speaking as a type nerd: there is nothing in the universe less essential than a couture typeface. So what if Monotype obtains a monopoly on all of them?
A few words toward the end for the ellusive ai menace, but zero word for the real, already existing, open source fonts. Nowaday I'll consider IBM Plex, Mozilla Fira or even Google Roboto before Monotype Anything.
You can live and let live while also politely pointing out that the title is annoying and cumbersome in its current form, and consequently against the guidelines.
“… please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize“ — from the HN guidelines. The guidelines are what keeps HN from becoming … something else.
This isn't even a title though. It'a a comment by OP. I can't even find the source for the claim that "one company basically owns every font." The title is "Where do fonts come from? This one business, mostly" but it does not make clear who actually owns the fonts on myfonts.com. I suspect that the creator retains the copyright, but the article does not say so. From the monotype website[0] it seems I'm correct. So not only is the title editorialized, it is wrong or at least misleading.
> Much of their earnings go back to Monotype, which takes a 50% cut of every sale on its site. (Creative Market similarly takes a 50% commission fee, while Etsy charges 20 cents per listing and takes a 6.5% fee for every sale.)
This is an aspect of one (if not "the") major issue for capitalist economies in this century. A functioning capitalist market must have effective and fit-for-purpose anti-monopolistic measures. In the era of the web, this means:
- separating content distribution (i.e. stores) from platform development (i.e. OSes, but also font-making tools, etc) and content itself (i.e. apps, fonts, movies)
- capping distribution fees. Anything above 10% is obscene.
Businesses should not be allowed to turn content-acquisition sprees or platform development into market-making distribution channels that result into self-reinforcing monopolies. Businesses should not be allowed to arbitrarily held entire production sectors effectively to ransom, imposing fees that in every other sector would be called exploitative and illegal.
Amazon, Google, Apple, Monotype - they are all aspects of the same problem. Anyone serious about ensuring a lively competitive landscape in modern economies should try to fix this problem. Otherwise, by 2050 the economic landscape will be dominated by immovable rent-extracting giants that will hoover every cent and limit innovation.
The article fails to explain how the alleged monopoly of Monotype hurts smaller type foundries. Reads almost like a hit piece. There's some story about an independent author not having a legal team to protect from fonts stealing... d'uh. It's a comment on the US legal system, not on how bad Monotype is.
Making fonts is technically easy. FontForge is open-source. If you don't want to sell fonts through Monotype, nothing stops an independent artist or a company from keeping the books and dealing with payment process by themselves. And there is a lot of smaller companies who do that, not only Adobe and Google.
To be honest, I don't care much whether I see fancy proprietary rare font or the opensource one on a web site or a newspaper, or even in an app. I just need to see not awful letters to read words.
You know who cares? Marketing people. Probably, ads industry is the biggest fonts purchaser. Also, big enterprises like banks and other fintech, who has behemoth apps and they like to have some unusual (-ly inconvenient) mobile apps and web sites.
The regular users market just don't need that many fonts as presented at MyFonts.
Then it's not surprising why big companies pays only $12 per font. It's their market. Not a font designers one.
Every major brand is owned by a minority of multinational conglomerates. 90% of the money we spend in shops and online goes to a number of companies you could count on one hand. This issue is not restricted to fonts.
i'm working as a digital product designer for over 4 years in an agency, never heard about monotype really, there are some amazing independent foundries which fonts we were buying + using free open source alternatives on the projects with less budget. Currently I'm creating a notion file with the best independent foundries and their typefaces so it's easy to discover, pick favourites and come back to that file for the next time you need to choose a font, I will also add best open source typefaces to it, but monotype won't be in there
I wish someone would just use ML to pump out more fonts than we could ever need, none missing any characters because they could be constantly added to, and none of them would have copyright because they are ML created.
> Monotype endured financial difficulties and restructurings, eventually being acquired by the Boston private equity firm TA Associates in 2004
> In 2019, private equity firm HGGC bought Monotype for $825m, acquiring its roster of typefaces and setting it up for even more acquisitions.
Can we just make private equity firms illegal?
I enjoy playing board games. There is a company called Asmodee that was bought by a private equity firm, went on a series of acquisitions and mergers, sold to a different private equity firm (who are currently looking for a new private equity firm to sell to). So many things have gone downhill for boardgaming since private equity got involved. Prices went up, they made it more difficult to get replacement parts, they killed off many products and made a shell of formerly beloved companies like FFG and so much more. Is there actually an example of private equity being a good thing (I mean, other than for the rich people that benefit from the private equity)?
Not without upending capitalism (which, to be clear, I’d be ok with). The thing you are against isn’t private money buying entities, it is that our capitalist system does not align interests among stakeholders and instead is focused 100% on shareholder returns. We need better consumer, employee, environmental protection and to get money out of politics. Easier said than done…
Downloading and using fonts available on Fontesk can be a huge trap. Read it's “Licensing” page. It's simply not safe to use fonts downloaded there, one should really use it only for discovery, at best.
Iosevka is a fantastic open-source font that's fully customizable. I have replaced the fixed font on all of my devices and apps to a custom Iosevka build I made, and I don't think I'll ever turn back.
That’s not cookie pop ups. That’s functional programming strategies poisoning the brains of developers causing them to believe that rewriting their page on every request is preferable because otherwise they have to think about “70,000 page states”.
They’re trading user experience for a mythical silver bullet of programming that some dude on medium told them was the holy grail and proved it using simple, horribly contrived anecdotes.
EDIT: Also the concept of "virtual DOM" is way older than shitty websites themselves (was applied to native GUI stuff before JS was even a thing). What you're seeing is just a shitty website.
Yeah. It’s not like functional programming is known for being slow, and every page adopting these ridiculous strategies has universally gotten worse and slower. Oh wait.
Are we supposed to be upset by this? That we're all slaves to Big Font?
It happens that many of the free fonts are crap, and part of the reason Linux on the desktop never took hold was lack of good bundled fonts. As it turns out, good fonts cost money.
What was part of the problem was patent-encumbered rendering engines for a long time.
Fonts weren't what held the desktop back, what held it back was that it just didn't have the resources that commercial enterprises were and are able to pour into their own efforts.
With commercial, you have a manager in the boardroom that says here are the whiteboards of how it should look, now go make it and have it done by next week so marketing can tell everyone this is what they wanted. With open, you have a bunch of introverts who have to agree to talk to each other and not hate the other guy's idea too much.
Although I think part of the problem is just how much of a nightmare Fontconfig is. I dealt with fonts on Windows and macOS, and there were a ton of hoops you have to jump through if you want tight control over how you display text on-screen. But Linux was in a whole other realm altogether—you used Fontconfig to select your font, and Fontconfig is truly, truly awful.
Yeah, I know what its capabilities are. But the best software which uses fonts on Linux tends to do so bypassing Fontconfig.
It was slow, slow, slow getting good font rendering on Linux.
Whenever I consider Linux, I notice the shitty fonts and wonder what are its other glaring omissions. Probably an ignorant thought, but I can’t be alone.
Especially in the past, but even also today, most Linux distributions have indeed installed by default shitty free fonts, which were the main reason why the GUI of a default Linux installation looked much uglier than that of a default Windows installation or of a default Mac OS installation.
Nevertheless, the default fonts can be deleted and replaced with nice fonts, which can make any Linux look better than Windows or Mac OS.
I have been using for the last 20 years only Linux on all my desktops and laptops, but since the very beginning I have never used the default Linux fonts, but I have always replaced them immediately with beautiful fonts.
When I have started using Linux, it was much more difficult than today to find good free fonts, so I have bought many good typefaces from companies like Linotype, which no longer exists, because as mentioned in this article it has been bought by Monotype, or from Adobe, which appears to be the last big commercial vendor of typefaces which has not been bought yet by Monotype.
Nowadays, it is much easier to find good free fonts. Especially for programming and CLI windows there are a lot of very good free fonts from which to choose.
For proportional typefaces, it can be a little more difficult to find good free fonts, though there is always the solution to grab some fonts from Windows or Mac OS. I have stopped using Mac OS more than a decade ago, but I have still kept from it a Japanese typeface that I have liked and then I have continued to use on Linux, while from my last Windows I have kept Palatino Linotype for polytonic Greek.
So if some people use shitty fonts on Linux, that is their fault, not of Linux, because it cannot be expected for a free product to include good licensed typefaces, like those whose price is included in that of a Windows license or Mac OS license.
The Ubuntu font for example is definitely not shitty -- it was designed at Dalton Maag and it is a considered piece of work that a lot of typographers rather like.
It's definitely rather idiosyncratic, mind you.
So I don't personally use it on Linux. I use Google's Roboto, which is close enough to Apple's later San Francisco (which shares some common heritage and some common modern touches) that I don't go insane when switching between the two!
Roboto is again a considered bit of work by a highly competent designer.
I don't have problems with either. If I did, I could use the Fira suite, which is lovely.
Personally, my use of fonts are more utilitarian. In that context, the fonts shipped with a typical Linux distribution are perfectly usable and far from shitty. While I would expect someone who has more of an eye for design to have more discerning tastes, I would be surprised if many people shared an opinion as extreme as yours or mine. (I suspect that they would be more inclined to notice the quality of font rendering or missing favorite fonts than anything else.)
my experience migrating from win98/2k to linux was totally the opposite.
linux distros were some of the first to use proper LCD hinting and anti-aliasing on the fonts, so they always looked buttery smooth and polished when compared to the Microsoft offering at the time.
This is actually on my current todo list - replacing textedit with Helvetica to make notes on MacOS, with Featherpad and ??? font on Debian. Didn’t seem important but the default is so damn ugly.
Today, most fonts in practical use are open source fonts. When someone chooses a font for a web project, they typically pick something from Google fonts, which are all open source licensed. Android, the most common OS, uses open source fonts like Roboto by default which are also open source.
The article does not mention open source at all, it has one mention of Google Fonts which is kinda misleading ("the latter of which gives away fonts for free" - well, not really, many of these fonts are not from google and were already free, google is just providing a font hosting service).
An accurate statement would be one company dominates the proprietary font market, which is however only a small share of overall font use.