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Comment by strogonoff | Hacker News Reader

In the industry of big near-monopolies, let’s support small indie type designers. I personally can’t recommend enough Matthew Butterick’s work, for example. The price is not prohibitive, the license is easy to understand, while fonts are very well made and receive occasional free updates.

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My experience with commercial fonts is not great: I have had PragmataPro in my wishlist for a decade. I then bought it, to discover, for some reason, KDE doesn't render it correctly and it's twice as bold as it should be. In GTK4 apps it is decent, but everywhere else it is not the same look of the official screenshots.

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)

> I have had PragmataPro in my wishlist for a decade. […] KDE doesn't render it correctly and it's twice as bold as it should be. In GTK4 apps it is decent, but everywhere else it is not the same look of the official screenshots.

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.

Many font sellers give a small subset as a sample in the same format as the full download so that users can test.

But I would still contact the designer/seller even if only to just let them know.

Your rendering issue sounds like the one described here: https://blog.vladzahorodnii.com/2021/12/31/more-consistent-f...

Yes. If you ever find yourself buying a webfont for your latest website or logo, always see if you can buy it direct from the designer. Monotype takes a huge (like >50%) cut if I remember correctly.

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.

I bought Berkeley Mono largely for that reason. First, it's a great font that I love using. Second, it's a passion project from a small shop that cares a whole awful lot for the work and doing it right.

I really wanted to pick it up, but it lacks a lot of Unicode symbols which for some is a bit of a joke since they come in ‘ligature’ form.

Berkeley Mono looks good and fairly priced (for personal development), and I like that they offer both ligature and ligature-free versions. Might add to my collection.

MB is not just a knowledgeable about typography and fonts, he also published his online book using his own software he built in Racket. Definitely a true hacker!

MyFonts is a very convenient marketplace. Perhaps the indie designers should band together and create something like that of their own.

MyFonts sells typefaces by hundreds of foundries and thousands of independent type designers.

https://foundrysupport.monotype.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028...

My former neighbors run https://justanotherfoundry.com/ and I like their work and bought some.

Can you list out the fonts you like ?

Here are some of mine:

https://mbtype.com/

https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/

https://tosche.net/fonts

https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/

Not OP, but I like PragmataPro [0] by Fabrizio Schiavi and use it in my IDEs. I particularly appreciate his attention to glyphs in languages other than English, and how nice it looks (IMO) for console interfaces and box drawing [1].

[0] https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/

[1] https://fsd.it/wp-content/uploads/diagram.png.webp

What's the difference between app and website aside from the huge price increase?

You'd have to ask Fabrizio. I assume desktop is the cheapest because it's just you, and app/website is more expensive because there's some nontrivial risk you expose the font files in a way that others can get them for free.

Of course you'll expose them. It's not a risk, it's how things work.

I mean "expose" in the sense that you might expose the files in an unlicensed way, not just that the files are available.

His licensing model is somewhat confusing to me to be honest.

I often default to one of the Iosevka variants. https://typeof.net/Iosevka/ https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

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.

It's not Iosevka (really, what else can come close except maybe Envy Code R), but I have recently discovered Victor Mono and think it an attractive programming font: https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/

KLIM in New Zealand does outstanding work: https://klim.co.nz/

I used his Triplicate monospace font as my main IDE/terminal driver for about a year, and I think in a couple of logo sketches. His other fonts look good as well, if I get to do more visual design again I might get some of them too.

this is a great and virtuous cycle, to name and do business with small publishers and artisans (!)

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

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