The most expensive coding font for free?
indiegogo.com
There is now a fundraising project going on for PragmataPro to make it available for free under a Creative Commons license
indiegogo.com
People still pay for fonts instead of downloading cheap knockoffs because of ligatures, a wide amount of characters and meticulous kerning. All things that a monospaced font doesn't need.
The one thing this font seems to add is that it is supposed to look good without font smoothing. But then, why would anyone care about that in a world where we always render fonts with anti-aliasing anyway?
All the glyphs of PragmataPro are designed under suggestions of programmers. In the set there are many glyphs ignored by other monospaced font designers, because I designed this font with programmers for programmers.
PragmataPro are designed to work with and without antilaliasing. And it works
Apparently not on the Mac.
The font looks quite terrible in your own Mac screenshot, there is visible blur at least in the letters w,m and T.
(except for the APL glyphs, I'm not sure if Consolas has those)
Also, what possessed you to make a monospaced programming font condensed? Squeezing the proportions that way either allows you more characters on a line (bad programming practice) or less lines on a screen (also not good).
PS in your screenshot, the special ligature things such as the smiley and the (P), are partly cut off.
Not sure how the font being narrower results in less lines on a screen, though. I doubt the font height is greater.
PS the smiley is intentionally cut off. It's the best possible compromise I found to keep it recognizable also at lower sizes
Another way to put it, even if that font was available for free now I don't know I'd bother installing it just because ... there is the step of installing it. I would just rather pick a font from my default OS font choices.
Of course, it's a matter of personal taste, I did see one guy using Arial as a font on his text editor once...
It was hard to find a monospace font that looked great at larger sizes (14pt), but in the end I settled on Luxi Mono (http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Luxi-Mono). It actually doesn't look that great in their previews, but renders much more smoothly in my editor. This makes me think that the operating system/rendering engine probably plays a bigger role.
I think that anyone considering a donation should at least try the freely available fonts to see whether they make any difference.
People starting businesses come here to be encouraged, and this guy isn't doing anything wrong. In fact, I wish more creatives would consider these sorts of alternative approaches to patronage.
It's important to give people honest and clear feedback. By blindly encouraging them, you are doing them a disservice. Perhaps he can fine-tune his effort. Perhaps his talents are best applied elsewhere. You simply don't know. If his skin isn't thick enough to accept honest criticism, he shouldn't be starting or doing anything on his own. Honest feedback is important.
I think the font looks great and I appreciate the effort and time it took to create this font. However I see it more as an art piece. Just like an artist might have painstakingly created a body of work for 5 years, just the effort put into it, makes it impressive. To someone (a collector, a gallery) the piece might be worth $200,000, to me though, it might be or worth $0, just because I don't like it or I am shopping for utilitarian things at the moment. "Would this piece help me code faster?" kind of reasoning. So maybe it is just the wrong market.
There might also be a luxury market out there for fonts, someone who has the latest and greatest set-up and has deep pockets who just needs something extra ? A book publisher? An OS vendor?
Last summer, Hyperakt [1] crowd-funded a beautiful radial depiction of the 2010 World Cup brackets [2]. I paid $25 for a great poster [3], and now Deroy has a new fan.
That project worked for the same reason all Kickstarter projects work: if the project succeeds, users and producers exchange money for goods. If the market doesn't validate your project, consumers aren't committed to pay and producers don't reap any benefits. This is a great model for project planning and idea validation.
On the other hand, this project extracts consumer rents immediately. If Fabrizio doesn't hit the $220k goal [4], users only get an option to purchase a license for $100 minus their contribution. No repercussions for the producer--he gets paid regardless. This is fine for licensing an existing font, but it sucks for spec work or otherwise non-existent work.
I'm sure everyone has a few questions about the amount he's charging. [5] However, we should focus on how Kickstarter provides a consumer-friendly market while this project exists on a producer-friendly market. These are some great introductory economic concepts.
EDIT: actually, each market has its own benefits. With Kickstarter, you can obtain market validation for free (or cheap). With IndieGogo, you can guarantee payment on existing products.
-------
[0] I took an hour to switch from Monaco to Anonymous Pro; now I wish I hadn't wasted that hour but at least I'm set for life.
[2] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hyperakt/2010-world-cup-...
[3] Even more beautiful after La Furia Roja took the Cup!
[4] Btw: ouch.
[5] Are we paying for the 4 years of work he's put in? Hasn't he made money from other licenses already? There are probably some obvious answers I'm missing out on.
I'm at the 50% of the work with PragmataPro, anyone can realize it just by looking at the screenshots. If I wanted to escape with the loot I would not be so stupid to draw about 1600 glyphs spending 3 years of my life.
Revenue from sales of licenses are not sufficient to cover even 10% of the time I used to arrive here.
Then came the piracy that has stopped the sales.
My dream is to finish this project getting the appropriate reward for my hard work. Am I wrong to dream this?
I believe I've been fair in evaluating your decision to sell on IndieGogo instead of Kickstarter. At the same time, you're going to need 22,000 contributions of $10 to open-source your font. That's a non-trivial number, but you're guaranteed to earn money for your hard work because you posted on IndieGogo.
I wish you the best of luck! I can't afford to help you out, but I'd like to analyze your choice of marketplace so other designers can follow your example.
Kickstarter is not an option for us Italians. It's US only. See http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/creating%20a%20project#S...
In reality it does, and that is why the market's reaction may be just as unfair as up-front payments. (And I think your initial reply was related to fairness, correct me if I'm wrong.)
Indie music can always fall back on giving away tunes to support a touring and merchandising play, but someone that puts years into a font only to see it pirated isn't exactly given the opportunity to rent a tour bus.
I think that if he can make it work, he deserves our encouragement.
I gave my best effort to achieve the perfect balance of symbols, letters Western, Cyrillic, Greek. And someone has noticed!
I tried financiers from Google, Canonical, Apple, IBM, SAS, Microsoft and many other companies with computer connection without success, knowing that these companies have funded other projects of the same caliber of PragmataPro.
I keep hoping to find greater understanding between professionals like you. Don’t let me down!
Perhaps if your campaign page had some verbiage about this font's special features and how it is really different than others, it would help more people to notice?
That said, I'm very mixed on this kind of "ransomware" development. If you want to share, share. If you don't, don't. But front-loading the costs of your proprietary software product on people who actually want free software is borderline unethical, IMHO. Obviously people are free to pay if they want to, but if you really want to support free development there are better targets.
Fonts often take thousands of man-hours to complete, and faces with extended characters are much more involved.
What this designer might lack in business chops he makes up in generousity. How many competent designers are willing to do something for $25k a year?
http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymouspro.html
Personally, PragmataPro looks too condensed for me. It is probably more "economical" to use condensed fonts, but to me, it is really not very readable.
I saw a stat the other day that stated there were more Porsches in Greece than people declaring they earn enough to actually afford to buy them (by a significant amount)
*edit And there are perfectly legal ways to reduce your tax burden. The point I'm laboring so hard to make here is that it's an absurd tax rate.
Not paying taxes is great if you don't cost the government anything. All of a sudden, though, when you want the services but don't want to pay for them, you become the leech that people keep accusing the poor of being.
You may say, “but I never said I wanted any of those things!” Too bad. You live in a society, and a democratic one at that (or at least I assume as much—these citizens certainly do). That means if you want to pay fewer taxes, “all” you have to do is convince enough people that the government shouldn't provide a safety net, and then reduce taxes accordingly. In the meantime, just like you can't murder or steal because society says it's wrong, you shouldn't be able to dodge taxes.
And by the by, because these countries have VAT, when people don't pay their taxes, typically what they do is they ask the customer to pay VAT (because it's included in the price), and then they pocket the resulting money.
No, there really is no justification whatsoever for tax evasion. At least no more of one than there is for stealing. In the end, it is still illegal. When a government fails to enforce said illegality, you get a system that breaks.
And guess what? People recognize that. And when people think they're being jerked around..
Also keep in mind that it isn't half of everything. These systems are typically progressive, so it's likely because this will be a large sum ($220,000) all at once that the tax rate is that high.
(I am not actually an expert in matters of the Italian tax system, so I guess it's possible that they all pay 43% tax on all income, although goodness knows how the country could be in such dire straits if that's the case)
At least that's what people used to do, but I guess it's been stopped now.
You're still going to be paying at least 20% corporation tax on the profits though and then probably 22.5% on the dividend itself.
But whenever they say my money will go towards a discount (or a charity) if the deal fails, I never go for it.
I'm not sure I've ever seen one succeed in that situation, actually.
I mean, they meet the goal, but the person never delivers.
Still, if the fundraising were arranged on something like kickstarter where I'd get my donation back if it fails to reach the goal I'd kick in a bit. Not terribly interested in a discount on the other license.
One (your?) school says readability is promoted by having as much visible structure as possible. The other (mine!) says readability is promoted by having as much visible context at the same time, as long as the structure is apparent.
so instead of
if (test1)
{
do_something1();
}
else
{
do_something2();
}
if (test1) do_something1();
else do_something2();
if (a == 1)
{
c = "hello";
}
else if (b == 2)
{
c = "goodbye";
}
else
{
c = "...";
}
c = a==1? "hello":
b==2? "goodbye":
"...";
c = a==1? "hello": b==2? "goodbye": "...";
I just didn't want to write a bunch of nonsense code as an example.
Today it enables programmers to fit WAY more characters on a line.
It's like, the perfect oneliner font.
if (something) {
something();
} else {
something_else();
}
if (something)
{
something();
}
else
{
something_else();
}
The second one is orderly. Block separation is very clear, and each brace is matched by an equal.
IMO, if you need to worry about how many lines of code fit on your screen, it's probably time to refactor (or upgrade from a netbook).
I might be crazy though, because I write
int* foo
int *foo
> IMO, if you need to worry about how many lines of code fit on your screen, it's probably time to refactor (or upgrade from a netbook).
But also:
> Block separation is very clear, and each brace is matched by an equal.
Block separation is equally clear in the first example (same column means same block), and if your IDE can't show you matches if you're lost, it's time to upgrade from ed or edlin.
Also,
> I might be crazy though, because I write "int* foo" instead of "int \foo" [edit: \ should be asterisk. can't make it show one, though]
You are indeed crazy, or at least misguided and confusing. because
int* a, b;
int *a, b;
I agree with your points for functions, (most)loops, switches, and so in, but for if/else try/catch/finally do/while an other multiblock statements, I think it helps to have some convention to group them, other than indent level. The blocks depend on each other, not just are in proximity.
I would never do:
for (a;b();a++) {
stuff();
} if (test) {
...
}
...
} else {
catchall();
} if (new_test()) {
...
Basically, it isn't about block delineation or about vertical space, its about grouping logical units that have multiple blocks at the same nesting level.
I think it would be really interesting to see how people's code style preferences translated to how they design things (or prefer designs). I like minimalism and lots of whitespace in designs, and it definitely translates to how I best read code.
if (...) {
...
} else if (...) {
...
}
if ... :
...
else if ... :
...
if ... :
...
else if ... :
... int* foo, bar;
Meaning:
int* foo = whatever;
// do some stuff with foo, now we need bar
int* bar = whatever;
If it really has to be done like that, I just suck it up in that case. C has its warts.
{
else
}
I completely get the reason why code blocks were first introduced in these comments, but think the "int" versus "int " discussion is offtopic.
Compare this with two major alternatives to this model: Kickstarter and things like the Humble Indie Bundle.
In one, I pledge money now for some future benefit, but I do so knowing that I only end up paying if the project reaches enough support and funding. This feels safe: I can pledge however I think the result is worth, because I only pay if it succeeds.
In the other, I can get my reward immediately (instant gratification!), but I can choose how much to pay for it.
The problem of Indiegogo, is that I have to pay now, but I cannot be sure that I actually get anything in return (a discount on a license is not enough). This means the risk of investment is much higher. I did pledge some money, but not what I would pay for the font were it either in Kickstarter form or through a "Humble Bundle" kind of model. I am sure I am not the only one.
To turn this into some useful advice for Fabrizio: How about giving donators preview access to the unfinished font? This brings the reward closer to the donation :)
In case the campaign does not reach the objective, I will offer to every contributors the regular license of PragmataPro™ at €20 (instead of €170) also if the contributor donate also just $1 only. At the end of this campaign every contributors can claims this offer. But please don’t offer anonymously if you want this discount.
It's now written in the fundrasing page of Indiegogo and for me it's like to be signed with blood...
This one looks good too, and maybe it'd be better than Proggy or one of the others around, but I don't think it's $220,000 better.
If I made a font like this, I would rather keep it as a donation, as the font was developed out of free will.
BTW I use Menlo...
Lets _not_ talk about whether or not this will work. Lets talk about how this is absolutely not, under any circumstances, a productive way to spend one's time.
187 people bought the previous version of this font. Do some sales projections, estimate market size, review the competition (such as the Ubuntu monospace fonts), talk to the existing customers about the features they actually _use_ everyday (hebrew characters? really?), and even I can conclude that the market isn't going to be viable for the given business plan.
I'm going to call Eric Ries, and ask him nicely if he can send you a copy of his book. Cause' you my friend, are doing it _wrong_ .
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera/1....
Yeah, I think I'm going to pass on this one.