Where do fonts come from? Monotype, mostly
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Today, most fonts in practical use are open source fonts. When someone chooses a font for a web project, they typically pick something from Google fonts, which are all open source licensed. Android, the most common OS, uses open source fonts like Roboto by default which are also open source.
The article does not mention open source at all, it has one mention of Google Fonts which is kinda misleading ("the latter of which gives away fonts for free" - well, not really, many of these fonts are not from google and were already free, google is just providing a font hosting service).
An accurate statement would be one company dominates the proprietary font market, which is however only a small share of overall font use.
Only platform that uses open-source typeface is Android with roboto/noto. If you are looking at webapps not marketing sites then yes you might get lot of Inter but trend is moving towards using system-ui font stack which is proprietary (except linux/android).
So no open-source typefaces are definitely not most used in practical use. Btw majority of the super popular ones are owned by Monotype the company this article is about.
I agree, but I think that says more about how the market for OS-software evolved (with the assumption that the OS should provide core fonts "for free") as opposed to an indication of monopoly or lock-in.
The average person probably doesn't notice (nor care) about the subtle differences between those major (OS-company supplied) fonts versus open-source equivalents or their competitors' proprietary ones.
I do.
And quite franky, all of them would laugh in your face if you told them that fonts are something that ought to be provided "for free". Fonts come from designers, designers work hard and should be paid for their work. Accordingly, real professional designers pay for fonts -- by the hundreds or thousands, sometimes, so many fonts their computers slow down if they don't use special software to manage them all.
This is also why the strongest, healthiest software ecosystem exists on macOS. Because macOS still has that cultural creative core of its user base, a culture which believes that people who create things should be paid for their efforts. Accordingly, you can still release a commercial proprietary program on macOS and expect to make significant money -- even from a small user base. That's certainly not true on Linux and it increasingly isn't true on Windows -- except, maybe, for gaming.
As for the average person, we're not even talking about the digital world. Everything in print, everything written on television, uses fonts. And if they employ professional designers, those are going to be commercial fonts. The real deal, the ones that were first set in hot type by Swiss or Austrian guys a hundred years ago or more. Open source substitutes are no substitute at all.
What do you mean by "strongest" and "healthiest"?
In my experience, most software is very cross-platform these days, and most platform-exclusive software is Windows-only.
That's a big *whoosh* or else you just felt like attacking a strawman.
Like I already said, I'm referring to how all major operating systems (including desktop Linux distros) bundle dozens of fonts to cover common needs. No average consumer is expected to spend additional money gaining the ability to see Greek math symbols or pseudo-handwriting or whatever.
It isn't the 1990s where you might see a retail-display box for Microsoft Windows 3.x adjacent to Microsoft TrueType Font Pack for Windows and Adobe Type Basics.
Similarly, disk-defragmentation tools are now in there "for free", and a TCP/IP stack is there "for free", etc.
The topic at hand is fonts you have to buy a license to use from Monotype, and fonts you can use freely.
I think you've got your HN blinders on. There are two types of projects: Projects where the font doesn't matter, and projects where the font is proprietary. Proprietary fonts utterly dominate the market whenever there's a paid graphic designer involved.
Most fonts in wide use are likely contract work, whatever license ends up being used for their distribution.
I use a customized set for terminal/IDE and like Aile for documents. Etoile is neat. Feels typewriterish. All covered by the SIL Open Font License.
reality check - do not expect to survive financially yourself in the tornado of modernity without a small niche to fit somewhere and security from elsewhere
https://foundrysupport.monotype.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028...
Same with Berkeley Mono, which I got the free trial version and it is a little blurry in Emacs, that kind of peculiar blurriness of fonts that have never been tested on other OSes. Most fonts are perfect on Linux, so those commercial ones might require some tweaks to be compatible with other engines, and I don't see any font designer taking the time to test on Linux.
So while I would want to support indie font designers, because of my "weird" environment, I should probably stick to the free ones that I can just swap out if they don't render correctly.
It sucks to have spent €150 for a font that doesn't render well. I don't want to ask for a refund because it might one day work on my system and ages ago I used the pirated version, which incidentally worked just fine on Linux at the time.
(Before anyone mentions my font stack is broken, I assure you it ain't, and it the closest to macOS': hidpi monitor, 2x scaling, grayscale aa, no hinting. Everything looks gorgeous, except those two commercial fonts)
The typeface designer can't fix broken/inconsistent OS rendering. Still, I would've asked for a refund so the creator is aware and could avoid other potential customers.
But I would still contact the designer/seller even if only to just let them know.
For example, my last project I used MD System from Mass Driver for the web fonts (https://mass-driver.com/typefaces/md-system) and Denton from Peregrin Studio (https://peregrinstudio.com/work/denton) for my logo.
Hard copies of Shakespeare have individual copyright because of their unique prefaces. Are these typefaces in copyright still because of the individual numerical descriptions being the work under protection, rather than the actual shape?
Is it something similar to How X’s recording of Bach’s Y concerto with The Z Ensemble is in copyright, but the musical score itself is in the public domain?
Thanks to Disney, this aspect of our economy and culture is completely broken.
There has been no appetite for extending terms in recent years, and things are entering the public domain again, including _Steamboat Willie_. I think there is an understanding that the CTEA will end up as the final extension and that further extensions are unlikely.
[0]: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/my-word-design-patents-on-...
The only thing missing would be hinting, but on retina displays and modern laser printers that's much less important than it used to be -- and you can always implement automatic hinting. And it's easy to extract kerning pairs as well.
I'm not saying this would be good for font creators or society. I'm just wondering why it hasn't become a common thing, when it doesn't seem like it's actually illegal.
(1) It's a lot of work.
(2) You'd get sued anyways and then have to explain to a jury the distinction between your vectorized raster and the original vectors --- I agree that a graphical interpretation of, effectively, a photograph of a curve is not the same thing as that curve, but it's a subtle point.
(3) Most importantly: it just doesn't matter enough. Universally "important" fonts (Helvetica, say) have widely-used liberally-licensed alternatives, but if you want Hoefler Whitney, you want the real Hoefler Whitney, for the same non-pragmatic reason that you'd want a real pair of D&G Daymasters.
But a computer font (as opposed to the typeface it represents) is a specialized program, ie it has logic as well as data. Specifically, kerning tables and the conditions under which to use ligatures would be lost by the approach you're proposing. But I'm not a typographer or font expert and I suspect other things also. Anyway that doesn't make it completely untenable, just not a complete & automatic process.
It is similar in concept to how recipes are handled by intellectual property law. A list of ingredients isn't protected, nor is a specific result. But a list plus instructions is. You can copy a recipe by applying a different set of instructions to the same list of ingredients, resulting in an identical dish. In this the type characters are the ingredients, but you still need to provide a set of instructions to combine them into a font. You can provide ones that create an identical result, but you can't simply copy them from the original font.
But for 99% of fonts it's going to work fine. Kerning tables should be easy to recreate simply by rendering all pairs of characters and measuring the resulting width. And there are only a handful of common ligatures (ff, fi, etc.).
But absolutely, there's a small percentage of fonts with more advanced features that would be harder/prohibitive to reproduce this way.
If the results were bad then, I can't help but think they'd be far better now. I have to assume automatic vectorization is now much improved since the 90's.
There are actually several variants all named Helvetica, which is why it's a really bad font to put into your CSS font stack if you're not delivering it yourself. Newer variants tend to use other names (e.g. Neue Haas Grotesk).
Frankly there are a lot of things that people and companies claim copyright on, and other people pay them for, that are not legally under copyright at all. But it is survival of the richest out there...
Most of that was buried under a heading about AI.
While the handful of sentences addressing AI were dismissive, my initial thoughts were directed towards the opening paragraphs of the article. They were describing a case where the creator received $12 in royalties for a font used in a major film. The irony is the font emulated handwriting, which is the sort of font that would benefit from all too human variation even if that human variation is emulated by a machine (e.g. using AI).
I decided I wanted my own (rather idiosyncratic) handwriting to use in some training materials, and an evening spent with a cheap and cheerful iPad app gained me a font to use for labels and captions. It's slightly eerie to see it.
EDIT: especially if it supports ligatures. I have some whacky ligatures that are distinctive to my handwriting.
Can't remember if it did ligatures.
I will look through my purchases shortly and edit this/comment again...
Edit: it was iFontMaker. And it's still around! I might have to have another go with this, because I last used it so long ago that I was using one of those rubber-tipped Wacom passive stylus things...
That's big news. You have to pay a font bill for your site every year?
There are so many "they may have missing glyphs", "free fonts may breach copyright", "there's no support" stories. And they amount to FUD from blog sites that don't talk openly about being on commission from commercial exchanges.
If you want great results on a website in particular, you could use a system font stack (which is often kinder on your users) or a common readable open font for body text, and then consider paying a brand designer with experience designing fonts to design a caption/headline typeface paired with it just for your own use. Or you could pair a system font with an existing font from an indie designer that does not use a font-serving CDN or have per-view licensing rules.
But there are high quality fonts in Google fonts that you can easily extract (the Create Block Theme plugin for Wordpress will now install Google fonts locally) and there are font-pairing tools that can help you make good decisions.
This is one of those things that has just moved on. There are so many ways to do this that don't involve stolen fonts.
I think it's good to remember that there is a species of online person call "the font nerd" (I know because I am one and have font nerd friends), and font nerds would very much like it to be important to select interesting type combinations, and many are not above rationalizing urgencies for that hobby. But I doubt anybody in the real world actually cares. Look at the site we're on!
I am often surprised by how much considered opinion non-professionals have about font choices, about readability etc.
The site we're on: I don't think we are going to agree that this is the real world... ;-)
(Ask anyone with dyslexia about typefaces and they can tell you a lot about what they like and don't like. Tell them about typefaces designed with dyslexia in mind and they may love you forever. I totally changed someone's life by introducing her to OpenDyslexic.)
I think I listed a broad enough constituency to rebut that claim. But I would agree that bad font choices (as well as bad colour contrasts) are a significant downside of all the flexibility.
"designers, brand designers, accessibility designers, book publishers" are all professional font nerds.
Teachers and "avid readers" might not be, but I dispute that either of those groups cares as much about font selection as font nerds wish they did.
Are you saying professional designers don't care about this stuff?
I'm a developer with front-end skills; I've spent a lot of time around professional designers for 27 years and I usually implement people's style guides.
(I'm also a photographer, which should disqualify me from claiming to be an artist)
And I don't mean that they have to be aware they are bound like this... many are driven subconsciously by fashion concerns even when they construct other rationalization for their preferences. Humans are intensely social and can turn nearly any kind of visible behavior or marking into a social signal.
A very small number might actually be concerned with actual usability/human factors of fonts, but most are in it for the tribal aspects of associating font usage with other "brand" or tribal identities. For the amateur producers, this can lead to cargo-cult emulation of the producers they admire. Even dissent here can fall into the same trap---consider how many times you've seen a LaTex document from a student who wants to be an author of a computer science paper, but doesn't really have anything to say (yet?)...
I like fonts. I get why people like fonts. I just don't think they matter.
Now, if Computer Modern was an important professional signal, and it was the case that Monotype owned its copyright and rapaciously charged for its use, that would matter quite a bit. But that's not the case; ironically, the one font we can think of that has professional implications is under an open license.
There is a battery of commonly-used fonts (the Microsoft fonts, we might as well call them) that are professionally important. But they're also universally available; they argue against the idea that font licensing is all that meaningful, as well.
I get what you mean -- Lobster is everywhere in the summer, and it is cute but now noticeably cheap.
But again I tend towards thinking that this is an over-egged pudding, because truly distinctive commercial fonts are as likely to have negative associations, surely? Unless you're buying something that nobody else uses, and that has the same support issues as these blogs try to scare people with.
If you want something truly distinctive, you can pay for someone to make a font suite for you, and you can consider your own needs.
The BBC have for example been transitioning their sites for years over to their "Reith" font family, which has enhanced readability and rather fewer confusable pairs. ITV (the original and largest commercial TV channel in the UK) has their own typeface, "Reem", which is rather nice work (classier than most of their TV content).
A pragmatic approach for many producers would be to pick a well-considered open-licensed sans or serif face and get a font designer to produce something distinctive (that need not be a truly complete face) to pair with it for captions, logotype, alternates etc.
that's not the problem, the problem is that there are 100x as many which are not excellent, have terrible kerning, etc. and sorting between them is really time consuming. Not to mention the category of "90% of the way there" knockoffs where you can't (because you're not an expert) tell till later that you're working with something really lame. If you're not a graphic designer, it's really difficult to navigate.
(and don't read that as an endorsement of graphic designers, hire those and you've just added a lot of form bathwater, out from which the function baby will be thrown :)
Monotype owns most major fonts: Arial, Helvetica, Gotham, Times New Roman.
font-family:Open Sans,Arial
font-family:monospace
The royalty is being paid in the OS licence attached to the viewer's computer, basically.
There are meta-font-families for system fonts, and you can effectively use "monospace", "serif", and "sans serif" and the system is going to choose the typeface that best meets those requirements.
For a time, Microsoft had a package of "core fonts for the web" that they made some deal with Monotype for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web
Those are still out there because the licence for those specific files remains legitimate, though a 21 year old typeface is not necessarily a useful thing anymore.
That package was used as the basis of "nonfree" packages in various distributions, that would download the MS archive file and unpack/install it.
I also wonder about how much Monotype charges Microsoft.
Ubuntu of course paid for their own system faces to be designed (which I like but not enough to use on my desktop). And Firefox has its own core font family (Fira), for example, that it can use in its own products as an alternate (I think it was designed for the late not-much-lamented Firefox OS)
So who is paying for Linux? Or is Linux using open source alternatives to these fonts?
They have included only a few fonts licensed from Monotype, e.g. Arial.
Besides the fonts donated by Microsoft, there are many other free fonts that have been donated by big companies like Google, Adobe, Intel, URW, Bitstream, JetBrains and others.
There are also many free fonts donated by individual creators.
But the versions of the font files in that package are rusting at this point; there's no compelling reason to use them anywhere, IMO.
By "donate" I have meant that the typeface owners have forsaken the revenues corresponding to the licensing fees that they have stopped demanding, allowing the free use of those typefaces. It can be said that they have donated the value of the work that was needed to create those typefaces.
You are also right that now this Corefonts package is mostly of historical interest, because the included fonts are very old. Unlike these, the corresponding Windows fonts have been maintained, by fixing bugs and adding new Unicode characters.
Most Linux users use only free fonts, some of which are metrically equivalent with the more popular Windows fonts, so they will substitute those in documents and Web pages.
Some Linux users, like also some of the users of other operating systems, may use unlicensed copies of some popular fonts.
Linux can (with quite a bit of pain) use font alternatives to swap in Liberation Sans for Arial or whatever (at least I assume that is what is happening)
Yes "Liberation Fonts" [0]
> [...] compatible with the most popular fonts on the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office software package (Monotype Corporation's Arial, Arial Narrow, Times New Roman and Courier New, respectively), for which Liberation is intended as a free substitute.
e.g The Debian package is here, which I you need to install to get sites to not look wonkey in the official Firefox package: https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/fonts-liberation.
I suspect packaged linux browsers through snap, flatpak, and the windows/macos equivalents, also bundle liberation fonts to avoid MS license issues.
Monotype has such deals across the board.
Not a font to download or embed but rather a set of fonts that is already embedded in all the things so anyone could just reference it. So in CSS something like:
font-family:open-free-monospace
font-family:open-free-serif
Lato is another superb open licenced face.
but most font are used for decorative use
This is what antitrust legislation is supposed to prevent. But the regulators and politicians are asleep (or bought off).
This is an aspect of one (if not "the") major issue for capitalist economies in this century. A functioning capitalist market must have effective and fit-for-purpose anti-monopolistic measures. In the era of the web, this means:
- separating content distribution (i.e. stores) from platform development (i.e. OSes, but also font-making tools, etc) and content itself (i.e. apps, fonts, movies)
- capping distribution fees. Anything above 10% is obscene.
Businesses should not be allowed to turn content-acquisition sprees or platform development into market-making distribution channels that result into self-reinforcing monopolies. Businesses should not be allowed to arbitrarily held entire production sectors effectively to ransom, imposing fees that in every other sector would be called exploitative and illegal.
Amazon, Google, Apple, Monotype - they are all aspects of the same problem. Anyone serious about ensuring a lively competitive landscape in modern economies should try to fix this problem. Otherwise, by 2050 the economic landscape will be dominated by immovable rent-extracting giants that will hoover every cent and limit innovation.
Making fonts is technically easy. FontForge is open-source. If you don't want to sell fonts through Monotype, nothing stops an independent artist or a company from keeping the books and dealing with payment process by themselves. And there is a lot of smaller companies who do that, not only Adobe and Google.
Well, it starts wrong. We've been printing for quite a while already and he didn't even invent removable lead type.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Even bigger than fonts, one company has a virtual monopoly on all eye glasses and lens.
The article is conflating “where fonts come from” to imply meaning all fonts. But it’s really meaning where all PAID fonts come from.
Free fonts like Roboto, Inter, Open Sans etc are used significantly more than any single paid Monotype font.
Back to eye glasses, I don’t know anyone making free frame & lens at mass scale. That industry is all paid product.
You know who cares? Marketing people. Probably, ads industry is the biggest fonts purchaser. Also, big enterprises like banks and other fintech, who has behemoth apps and they like to have some unusual (-ly inconvenient) mobile apps and web sites.
The regular users market just don't need that many fonts as presented at MyFonts.
Then it's not surprising why big companies pays only $12 per font. It's their market. Not a font designers one.
1) Expensive
2) A Black Market Commodity
People would have SyQuest drives full of fonts. Carefully labeled and organised.
A bad font would bring down your Mac.
A friend with a well managed Font library was a very valuable friend indeed!
I would buy that person a beer.
> In 2019, private equity firm HGGC bought Monotype for $825m, acquiring its roster of typefaces and setting it up for even more acquisitions.
Can we just make private equity firms illegal?
I enjoy playing board games. There is a company called Asmodee that was bought by a private equity firm, went on a series of acquisitions and mergers, sold to a different private equity firm (who are currently looking for a new private equity firm to sell to). So many things have gone downhill for boardgaming since private equity got involved. Prices went up, they made it more difficult to get replacement parts, they killed off many products and made a shell of formerly beloved companies like FFG and so much more. Is there actually an example of private equity being a good thing (I mean, other than for the rich people that benefit from the private equity)?
Not without upending capitalism (which, to be clear, I’d be ok with). The thing you are against isn’t private money buying entities, it is that our capitalist system does not align interests among stakeholders and instead is focused 100% on shareholder returns. We need better consumer, employee, environmental protection and to get money out of politics. Easier said than done…
I don’t think you can outlaw buying stuff in the genral sense. Ofc there is specific legsilation to defend the market at large from monopolies.
But the fact is some people collect stamps … other collect companies.
In general the whole point of ownership is that you can buy and sell things.
There is nothing to stop a new owner destroying a beloved IP.
What a glaring omission. There are tons of open, freely licensed fonts: https://fontesk.com/license/ofl-gpl/
That stuttering is me trying to scroll. When I finally can, I’ve been subject to a 10s penalty.
They’re trading user experience for a mythical silver bullet of programming that some dude on medium told them was the holy grail and proved it using simple, horribly contrived anecdotes.
That's not how virtual DOM works.
EDIT: Also the concept of "virtual DOM" is way older than shitty websites themselves (was applied to native GUI stuff before JS was even a thing). What you're seeing is just a shitty website.
It happens that many of the free fonts are crap, and part of the reason Linux on the desktop never took hold was lack of good bundled fonts. As it turns out, good fonts cost money.
What was part of the problem was patent-encumbered rendering engines for a long time.
Fonts weren't what held the desktop back, what held it back was that it just didn't have the resources that commercial enterprises were and are able to pour into their own efforts.
With commercial, you have a manager in the boardroom that says here are the whiteboards of how it should look, now go make it and have it done by next week so marketing can tell everyone this is what they wanted. With open, you have a bunch of introverts who have to agree to talk to each other and not hate the other guy's idea too much.
Although I think part of the problem is just how much of a nightmare Fontconfig is. I dealt with fonts on Windows and macOS, and there were a ton of hoops you have to jump through if you want tight control over how you display text on-screen. But Linux was in a whole other realm altogether—you used Fontconfig to select your font, and Fontconfig is truly, truly awful.
Yeah, I know what its capabilities are. But the best software which uses fonts on Linux tends to do so bypassing Fontconfig.
It was slow, slow, slow getting good font rendering on Linux.
Nevertheless, the default fonts can be deleted and replaced with nice fonts, which can make any Linux look better than Windows or Mac OS.
I have been using for the last 20 years only Linux on all my desktops and laptops, but since the very beginning I have never used the default Linux fonts, but I have always replaced them immediately with beautiful fonts.
When I have started using Linux, it was much more difficult than today to find good free fonts, so I have bought many good typefaces from companies like Linotype, which no longer exists, because as mentioned in this article it has been bought by Monotype, or from Adobe, which appears to be the last big commercial vendor of typefaces which has not been bought yet by Monotype.
Nowadays, it is much easier to find good free fonts. Especially for programming and CLI windows there are a lot of very good free fonts from which to choose.
For proportional typefaces, it can be a little more difficult to find good free fonts, though there is always the solution to grab some fonts from Windows or Mac OS. I have stopped using Mac OS more than a decade ago, but I have still kept from it a Japanese typeface that I have liked and then I have continued to use on Linux, while from my last Windows I have kept Palatino Linotype for polytonic Greek.
So if some people use shitty fonts on Linux, that is their fault, not of Linux, because it cannot be expected for a free product to include good licensed typefaces, like those whose price is included in that of a Windows license or Mac OS license.
It's definitely rather idiosyncratic, mind you.
So I don't personally use it on Linux. I use Google's Roboto, which is close enough to Apple's later San Francisco (which shares some common heritage and some common modern touches) that I don't go insane when switching between the two!
Roboto is again a considered bit of work by a highly competent designer.
I don't have problems with either. If I did, I could use the Fira suite, which is lovely.
In a world where Arial Illegible is the standard, I don't think we can complain too much.
FOSS doesn't as a whole pay much attention to visual aspects, one reason so much of the software just doesn't look nice. E.g., GIMP.
linux distros were some of the first to use proper LCD hinting and anti-aliasing on the fonts, so they always looked buttery smooth and polished when compared to the Microsoft offering at the time.
Funny how things shift around.