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Comment by aarchi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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!

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.

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.

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