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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

I read recently on Wikipedia (so you know this is good legal advice) that typefaces are not copyrightable. Is there an open version of this?

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While the letterforms themselves are not copyrightable, as I understand it, the digital representation is copyrightable. This digitation of Neue Haas Grotesk would then be under copyright. Retracing Neue Haas Grotesk to create a free alternative would be a monumental undertaking, especially at such high quality. It took Christian Schwartz 6 years to digitize Neue Haas Grotesk.

Typography is a lot of work. Support the type designers and pay for their work.

Couldn’t you have a program to print the font to a big PDF and then re-ingest it?

PDF files embed the vectors outlines for the letters used in the text and it's trivial to extract those into a font file. However, as the mathematical representation of the typeface is under copyright, this conversion does not make it free because the vector curves remain the same. The process would also likely lose the fine tuning of a professional typeface like the kerning, so it would not be desirable anyways.

What about printing it into a static image and then extracting the curves?

In Photoshop:

Make text

Rasterize text later

Select layer pixels

Use the tool that vectorizes pixel selections, it’s in the bottom of the vector layers panel

Open vectors in Illustrator

This won’t generate as clean of paths as a person would, though.

Ah ha, interesting, thank you. Cool, maybe one day I'll scan an original and have it auto-vectorified for less discerning folks like me.

I don't think I'm ever going to pay for it, to be honest. And besides, it isn't open and so I don't want it anyway.

Lots of things are hard. But I block ads and get them for free anyway.

Neue Haas Grotesk was revived to restore the small details lost from Helvetica, so if you aren't very particular you may as well use the easily-available Helvetica. There's plenty of more interesting typefaces than Neue Haas Grotesk or Helvetica though.

I actually think I shall. Thank you.

Why not just use one of the excellent free grotesque fonts instead? Some examples:

https://hanken.co/collections/free/products/hk-grotesk

https://www.freshfonts.io/

https://rsms.me/inter/

Thank you. Much appreciated!

My go-to sans-serif font is always Inter (https://rsms.me/inter/), which feels similar enough.

Inter is and feels much more similar to SF Pro than Helvetica (rounding, the R, dots on lowercase I, design for screen vs. print). That said, they're both great fonts.

Inter is San Francisco without the clean 90° aligned terminals and slightly stranger proportions. It’s like Arial is to Helvetica.

Very cool. Mega thanks! That's a great font!

My favorite sans-serif font is Meta by Erik Spiekermann which is described as the anthesis of Helvetica. It appeals to my exact nature and has humanist touches like the bend at the top of ascenders (b, h, k, l). Fira Sans is a free alternative that is derived from it and works well when Meta is not an option. For code samples, Fira Code pairs well with it.

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

Helvetica praise always feels like wine commentary to me. 20% of it is probably on point, 80% is the reviewer stroking their ego. It's really boring. It's not even Vanilla.

Nimbus Sans L and its descendent TeX Gyre Heros are pretty close and suitable for your license requirements.

I was going to praise URW++ for their trust-based rather than analytics-based web licensing (and for their long-standing commission of Ghostscript and GNU fonts), but then I noticed it was sold to Monotype, like almost all type foundries. What options do we have left for non-intrusive (banner-requiring) web fonts?

Obviously that falls into it "it depends on what you're looking for" territory, but some of my favorite (AFAIK) open source fonts:

- Arimo, Tinos, and Cousine: The "Croscore" fonts designed by Monotype's Steve Matteson as metrically-compatible replacements for Helvetica, Times New Roman, and Courier, respectively. (Red Hat's Liberation fonts are basically the same.)

- Adobe's Source Code, Source Sans, and Source Serif Pro fonts: now that Source Serif has its italics (and Google Fonts looks like they've finally bothered to update), these are pretty terrific.

- Charter: an old font that's actually really high quality.

- The Computer Modern fonts from TeX: easy to overlook if you're not using TeX, and makes anything you use them with look like you are using TeX, but they're good typefaces.

- Cooper Hewitt: a sans serif designed for the museum of the same name. Maybe the most relevant in a discussion about Neue Haas Grotesk, since it's another font with a strong sense of design and purpose, and, well, isn't Helvetica. :)

Most of the Google Fonts can be downloaded and self-hosted, FWIW, and you can use Font Squirrel to subset them and make them extremely small and fast. I do that with a few commercial typefaces on my own web site. (Commercial typefaces that actually allow this with their license!)

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