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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Whoa. How does this work?

One of the major issues we had at my previous company weaning people off of powerpoint (to google docs) was brand fonts. Ours, of course.

A lot of what is considered brand identity in presentations comes from fonts, which makes Google Docs Slides a non-starter for many unfortunately.

(we ended up making them in powerpoint and using the Google Docs compatibility mode with pptx).

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  > Google Workspace lets brands who pay enough embed custom corporate fonts into their docs and slides. Normally, these are locked to just those brands shelling out for custom typefaces, but there's one loophole: the ol' copy/paste. Below are a selection of brand fonts with which you can do exactly that. Enjoy.

Oh thanks! I looked but I missed that.

So, I need to be super rich? Thats sad.

Why did we go from owning the software we run and being able to just modify things as we see fit to "You have to give Google a lot of money so you can have your own font in your own presentation"?

Where did things go this wrong?

If you want to drink your own wine in a restaurant, you have to pay for that, too.

This isn’t much different; there still are plenty of non-Google options for creating presentations to choose from that do allow using your own font.

If SaaS is a restaurant, what's software I purchase? A personal robot chef with an infinite ingredient supply, no charge for using my own wine?

I think that supports the "Where did things go this wrong?" sentiment.

The analogies with physical businesses never make sense. Running an application on your own computer is nothing like eating at a restaurant. Just because the software is obtained from a server somewhere doesn't mean it's like going to a physical place to eat. Browsing to www.company.com is not akin to walking into a company's physical store. You're not "there." There is no "there."

>If you want to drink your own wine in a restaurant, you have to pay for that, too.

Depends on the place. Tons of restaurants in New Jersey encourage you to bring your own wine bottle and don't charge a "corking fee".

I'm going to go the unpopular route and ask, how mission-critical are fonts, really? Protected fonts such as these can't be mission-critical, legally, right?

Never felt myself lacking for fonts in Docs, myself. Quite the opposite, Google Fonts has way more than I'd ever have preinstalled and is now my primary avenue for typeface discovery.

Depends on what you do.

Are you building a slide deck on your systems architecture? Probably doesn't matter.

Are you building a marketing deck on your new corporate identity? Probably matters a lot.

Either way, the tool I'm using shouldn't be the one deciding what matters and what doesn't. Just let me use my font as I please!

It doesn't matter on the corporate identity either.

It may not matter to you, but in this circumstance, your opinion doesn’t matter.

It only matters to the designers. The users don't care which sans-serif font the designers picked, they all look the same.

It’s subtle, but attention to detail all around will add up to something that looks polished. I appreciate that as a user, at least

The designers are generally the ones doing and watching presentations on design. They are also the users of the office suite in this case.

Fine, I’ll take the bait. If this is true, then why isn’t everything in the world Arial/Helvetica?

Because people are stupid enough to worry about many things which don't matter. This includes, but is not limited to, font choices.

Interesting how you seem so sure about what matters to other people, when the reality is that anything matters that people say matters to them. If people care about fonts, they do care about fonts.

If I follow your train of thought to its logical conclusion, nothing matters. Which is correct, but sort of pointless to state. On top of this nothingness, we typically stack personal preferences.

You'd be hesitant to trust a brand if it can't keep consistent styling. Branding helps users identify a brand and believe it or not the aesthetics of a brand make a great deal of impact on consumers.

As others have said, your point comes across as "let's remove design who cares" because design and human computer interaction roles stopped where your understanding ends. Everything looks the same to you after all (it doesn't, you just haven't noticed it affecting your decision making).

Consistency is not the same as making a technically-unique-but-visually-indistinguishable Helvetica clone.

I could see some kafkaesque organization writing-up or firing someone for using the wrong font on a PowerPoint presentation.

Such companies should be mocked and shamed, not held up as examples to follow.

You can still pay Microsoft money to get a desktop copy of Powerpoint, which will use your system fonts. Using google docs is entirely self-inflicted

Granted, you now need to pay Microsoft a monthly fee for Powerpoint instead of a one-time-fee. But that is in large part because too many people preferred Google Docs, so Microsoft tried to become more like them

You can still pay Microsoft a one-time-fee instead of a yearly one. You can even go to a physical store and get a physical box with Office (granted, it doesn't contain anything inside it anymore )

When we stopped paying for things. Seriously. If you pay for software, you can modify it. If you pay Google, they’ll modify it for you.

Yes, the EULA may prohibit modifications of local installations, but you’re not physically restricted from doing so - only contractually.

Most people decided that convenience was better than freedom and self-determination.

If people want the freedom to use their own fonts in their own presentation, and don't want to pay handsomely for the privilege, LibreOffice is freely downloadable. But they don't want to use that for some reason.

We ignored Richard Stallman?

No, you need to be at least a medium-sized corporation basically.

Then because your contract with Google is large enough to matter, they'll add your custom corporate branded fonts to your font dropdowns.

Basically the level where you've progressed from user to customer.

copy/paste doesn't tell you much - here's the text/html content they put on your clipboard if you're curious. Apparently GDocs supports this out of the box, just hides it from the selection box. Which makes sense given that it doesn't support any font.

<html> <body> <meta charset='utf-8'><meta charset="utf-8"><span style="font-size:22pt;font-family:'Facebook Sans',sans-serif;color:#000000;background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">I just stole Facebook Sans  </body> </html>

> Google Workspace lets brands who pay enough embed custom corporate fonts into their docs and slides. Normally, these are locked to just those brands shelling out for custom typefaces, but there's one loophole: the ol' copy/paste.

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