Hacker News Reader

Comment by js4ever | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, buying fonts is still a thing nowadays with all the free fonts everywhere? (google fonts and others)

Honest answer: that's a bit like asking "why buy games when there are so many free games available?"

Modern fonts are vastly more elaborate pieces of software than what people tend to think they are [1], and you get what you pay for. If you just need 56 letters, get a free font. If you need full Unicode Latin support, with proper kerning between each of the thousands of possible pairs, with ligature substitution for hundreds of tuples, not just for one language but several, with compositional repositioning for languages that require it, and alternate glyphs based on initial, median, final, or isolated letter form, and so on and so forth, then dollars will get you what free cannot.

Everyone can make a motivational jpg, but you need to pay a skilled digital artist to create a unique well composed new work. In the same vein, anyone can make a font, but you'll need to pay a skilled typographer (or foundry) if you want a well designed, feature rich typeface.

[1] https://pomax.github.io/CFF-glyphlet-fonts/

Seconded. The company I work for is currently commissioning a custom family of fonts from a major digital type foundry... and it's a vast (and expensive) undertaking. Consider potentially important features like support for[1]:

    font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums

For fonts with the support coded in, this variant means numbers in tables will line up in your font without outright switching to a monospace font. Beyond good glyph design, as the parent mentions, there's a lot of work to craft a professional modern font esp. the more of the Unicode language space it spans.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-varian...

The fact of modern vector fonts being software is what makes most fonts fall under copyright law in the first place in the US. Generally, absent actual software in the font file, typefaces aren't copyrightable at all. Pure bitmaps of typefaces are pretty much free for everyone to use. But if you use a protected vector font to generate those bitmaps, then they become infringing. Color of bits and all that.

This is also a US-centric comment. Other jurisdictions have differing rules to cover fonts and typefaces. In the US, however, it is fully legal to lawfully acquire a physical font specimen, scan that font, and do what you wish with it.

Caveat: IANAL

It definitely is. Some of the best fonts are still paid. And there are only so many high-quality free-fonts. That said, I haven't personally purchased a font (or worked for a company that purchased a font) for several years.

I can't imagine who would pay for this particular font :/

I can see Dinesh buying it just to make Gilfoyle's skin crawl.

In addition to the other replies, there's more to a font than the shapes of the letters. "You get what you pay for" correlates even more strongly with things like hinting (internal instructions of how to try to align with pixel edges) than it does with the immediately visible appearance of the letterforms.

That's not a consideration for everyone, admittedly, but an incredibly important one for those who _do_ have to take it into account.

I'd say yeah, I bought PragmataPro because it's a work of art and has great ligature support. Operator Mono is another popular choice.

I bought FF Kievit back in the day because it was the most beautiful thing I had ever saw. Now everything on the web is Proxima Nova and it is a boring, boring place.

In terms of ligature support, as a free alternative there is FiraCode... https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

Iosevka as well, which has custom builds (on of which is aimed at making it as like pragmata pro as possible and it is damn close).

Gorgeous font, bit of a bugger to build but once you get it working hours of tinkering ;)

Yeah, Fira Code is an excellent font, and it is something I have used in the past. PragmataPro looked prettier to my eyes so I bought it, that's all. In fact, it's linked as an alternative on that Github page.

The condensed look and lack of interlinear spacing of PPro are a nice bonus, not that there aren't other condensed fonts. I suppose for intl use PPro might be nice too since it has 9000+ glyphs, and the dev is still adding more.

One big problem with Fira Code is its lack of italics.

I started my career as a graphic designer, and I studied typography from an early age (my parents are both retired graphic designers and worked in the pre-digital era when designers really had to know their stuff). With the exception of a few well known typefaces (roboto, open sans, probably less than five in all) those free fonts suck. The kerning is terrible, there are usually no variants, they don't anti-alias well at different sizes, the international support is non-existent, etc. There is an absolutely insane amount of detail work that goes into designing a font and only the most OCD designers can pull it off, and only with an enormous amount of effort. If you spend 6 months to a year developing a font, you should be paid for it. Since I do notice these things I don't mind paying $100 for a font that ticks all of the above boxes. I stare at my IDE all day, and I wouldn't use a shitty color scheme, so I wouldn't use a shitty font on top of it.

Usually when I stop to admire the typography on a certain site it's almost always a paid font.

Same reason why a lot of people don't use things like material design. People want their designs to look good and stand out from the crowd - not have the same cookie cutter site as everything else.

I'm also curious as to how this doesn't violate Microsoft's copyright on Comic Sans, since it's a derivative work being sold for profit.

From the about section: "Comic Code only takes inspiration from Comic Sans and was drawn entirely from scratch, in case you are wondering."

So that's effectively asking why Arial doesn't violate Helvetica's copyright.

Case law on copyright for fonts is complicated, with fonts generally having less protection than other works. My impression is that Comic Code is no more derivative of Comic Sans than, say, Arial is of Helvetica.

Hi, the designer here. As for the font name, Microsoft owns "Comic Sans" but not "Comic" or "Sans" alone. And as already explained, fonts are copyrighted as software codes and a new one has to be made from scratch (except of course when you are the owner or permitted in license agreement). In terms of visual similarity, Comic Neue is much closer to Comic Sans but MS hasn't done anything with it. If that's fine, Comic Code surely would be too. In any case, I did speak with the MS guys prior to release, and they saw no issues with either trademark or copyright.

Font IP is special!

The names are trademarks, so you can't copy them exactly, but you can use suggestive alternates. Palatino => Palatable, for example. TeX Gyre Pagella is a very nice version.

The code is copyrighted, so you can't copy the code exactly. But -- you can rasterize a font, print it, scan it, vectorize the output, add your own hints, and now have a clean re-implementation. The shapes of the letters are not copyrightable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com