How the Doves Type Was Nearly Lost | Hacker News Reader

How the Doves Type Was Nearly Lost

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I feel really conflicted about a typeface like this not being public domain. It's true that Green has put a lot of work into making a modern digital version. But he also didn't design or create the original and it's over 100 years old.

Anyone can create a similar typeface from scans of Doves Press books, as Green originally did.

And he said as much himself in an earlier discussion on HN:

"The name Doves Type® is copyrighted to protect my drawings. But if someone wants to go ahead and do what I did and recreate the type from the original printed sources there's nothing to stop them, as long as they do not use my font data as a basis for their font. It took me 5 years, on-&-off, to reach the stage where I was satisfied that I had captured the overall essence of the original. Though one can never recreate the patina of a letterpress type – the appearance of each glyph varies from word to word, line to line, page to page. That's why I prefer to call my digital type a facsimile."

Trademark-copyright confusion aside, seems right on.

> as long as they do not use my font data as a basis for their font

The law is not on his side.

You can't use the actual digital font file, but if you print the font, or even just screenshot it you can reproduce it completely legally. You can even automate the conversion if you are careful in how you do it.

A typeface can not be copyrighted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

> Trademark-copyright confusion aside, seems right on.

That's not what the law is though. Typefaces simply can not be copyrighted.

As an aside I've always found it completely bizarre how of all the digital media used on a web page, for some reasons fonts have copyright restrictions built into them, but nothing else does.

I agree w/ everything you're saying, except that I read "...as long as they do not use my font data as a basis for their font..." as "don't use the machine-readable data in my font files as the basis...". Analogously, I read it as: "Go ahead and write a program that does exactly what my program does. Just use the output of mine or the original mine was meant to emulate, not the code I wrote, as your basis."

> A typeface can not be copyrighted:

This depends on the country, though. You're right when it comes to US law, but this is in the UK, which has different laws. Though if I'm interpreting the Wikipedia article right, it appears that in the UK only original typefaces can be copyrighted, not revivals.

> As an aside I've always found it completely bizarre how of all the digital media used on a web page, for some reasons fonts have copyright restrictions built into them, but nothing else does.

This is a very old restriction, and it predates computers. It was designed to prevent a malicious individual from copyrighting the alphabet.

A well made digital font file is a lot more than pictures or even vectors of letters. There's a whole bunch of hinting and even a virtual machine with opcodes for tweaking how letters appear at particular pixel sizes and in combination with surrounding letters. A well made font file really is a compiled software program with built-in assets that someone sat down and developed and debugged, not unlike a full game or an app.

could you point me to some resources about the "virtual machine" you mentioned? sounds very interesting.

Here's a random Google hit: http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~slam/fonts/tticomp/introduction.ht...

And another, with an opcode list: https://github.com/janelia-flyem/go/blob/master/freetype-go/...

And an example font program: https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/...

Notice the presence of "if" and "call" and "loop".

Before super highres retina type displays, properly hinted fonts made all the difference. A naive vector rasterization might bulk up from a 1px to a 2px line width completely inappropriately as font size increases. A properly developed one would ensure pixel perfect rasterization at most font sizes, even in the case of very lowres pixels.

The complexity of truetype is a source for many bugs, not least because some operating system interpret the font virtual machine in kernel mode. Also, it looks like the font code for a large amount of systems trace back to a common ancestor.

This one is a very good read:

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.no/2015/07/one-font-vulne...

"For example, most TTF engines are based on Microsoft's original implementation of the format, including Windows GDI (win32k.sys), Microsoft GDI+, Microsoft DirectWrite, Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash. Likewise, most OTF engines are based on Adobe's original implementation, including Microsoft GDI (ATMFD.DLL), Microsoft DirectWrite, Microsoft Presentation Foundation and Adobe Reader. As a direct outcome, any bugs present in the original implementation that was later branched and included in multiple products were likely propagated, and may affect various programs or operating systems. This is of course an extremely frightful scenario, with a single 0-day vulnerability (...)"

> That's not what the law is though. Typefaces simply can not be copyrighted.

I'd chalk this up to a disagreement over what he means by "font data," but I'll admit it's not totally clear.

Regardless I think we're in agreement: the font, the file itself, is copyrighted, but the typeface isn't.

Here seems to be the fruit of Robert Green's labor: http://www.typespec.co.uk/doves-type/

I had made a mental note some years ago to buy a copy of the font. It seems like a good time to do so.

They want $40 per 10K views? Does anyone know if I'm reading the license description correctly?

Related question: Do the licenses for desktop users only cover print works?

No, £40 for a perpetual license to use it as a web font on website with up to 10k average monthly views. And a desktop user could use the font to create digital works like images and videos, just not ones that embed the font.

That makes a lot more sense. Thanks for clarifying.

I have nothing to add. I just wanted to that say when I read "Most Beautiful Typeface" I thought it was going to be another boring post about Helvetica, and it was not, and I'm really glad for that.

Funny, first thing that came to my mind was Comic Sans...

Some discussion from a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951869 and three years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964013

What a nice story... Here's a good book if you want to learn more about the world of type setting: Just my Type by Simon Garfield.

http://www.simongarfield.com/pages/books/just_my_type.htm

Loved this book, it was a surprisingly entertaining and witty read for a book about fonts.

Not a typographer ... It looks nice, all the letters have elegant curves and all ... But I personally find it hard to read.

I also wouldn't call the most beautiful, although beautiful it is.

You can't say that without saying what the most beautiful is?

The Economist originally covered the topic 3 years ago:

http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21591793-le...

And here was the (little bit) of discussion here about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964013

Looking at http://www.typespec.co.uk/doves-type/ I see that if you use this typeface on a webpage, then you have to pay-per-viewing of said page.

Is there a discussion for the arguments for and against pay-per-view when using font? Have their been licensing schemes for typeset work where the printer had to pay each time a person opened the book using said typeface?

I think you may have misinterpreted the license. There's no pay-per-view.

From the description:

"It is also available in web font formats for self hosted websites (up to 10K monthly pageviews on average)."

You buy a license for your website. Large websites (with more than 10k monthly pageviews) need to contact them for a license.

How do you know what the average page views will be when you buy it? How do you measure a page view?

For a blog or newspaper it may be obvious, for web applications it can be very hard to determine.

You might not know up front, for sure. I know when I load our website, I see a "transferring data from hello.myfonts.net" in the status bar, which I guess some sort of phone-home mechanism. If we go over the limit, I assume they'll notify us.

It's rather a simple algorithm:

1. Do I average more than 10k page views a month right now?

No: Buy license good up to 10k page views per month. Yes: Contact them about a bigger license.

You're not asking how to measure your own page views, are you?

The most beautiful Latin typeface? Do these hold a candle to semitic calligraphy?

Beauty is in the eye of the sub-editor. For my current projects this font would not suddenly make everything beautiful. I doubt Google will be making the change to it either, it maybe the most beautiful font but not for clearly presenting information on screen.

Journalists can use these 'best ever' phrases even though only small children have 'best ever' colours,foods, fonts and so on. (Blue/Pink, chocolate, Comic Sans).

Truly beautiful semitic calligraphy can't be captured by a typeface; this is a different sort of aesthetic appeal.

Also an interesting Radio 4 programme on the same topic: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07lhh6z

heathens! computer modern uber alles!

Good old British eccentricity!

Can't believe Buzzfeed didn't run with their click bait subheading: You won't believe what happens next! -or- What happens next is incredible!

I had submitted it with How The World’s Most Beautiful Typeface Was Nearly Lost Forever which is pretty baity. I thought so at the time but nothing better came to mind. The current title is a big improvement from small changes.

(look at all the comments here that respond pretty narrowly to the superlative)

was expecting some kind of comic sans troll.

Only thing worse than a repost is the person commenting that it's a repost. Or that was true til I posted this.

It's common to bring in the old discussion for perspective. Nothing to do with it being a repost. (Both of those links are alternative treatments anyway.)

It's not like you can go contribute to those discussions anymore.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12480957 and marked it off-topic. From the FAQ:

> Are reposts ok?

> If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.

That person isn't saying "this is a repost". They're saying "you might find these earlier conversations, and the submissions they link to, interesting."

Is buzzfeed simply incapable of publishing without clickbait headlines? Are there people who don't find it patronizing?

These questions plague me.

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