10 ms·

Where do fonts come from? Monotype, mostly

327 points by kansaswriter 3y ago

PappGaborSandor 3y ago
[dead]
jwilk 3y ago
Please don't editorialize submission titles.
- cf100clunk 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - j16sdiz 3y ago
    This is against the guidelines : > Please don't do things to make titles stand out, > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize
    - housemusicfan 3y ago
      Sometimes people color outside the lines. Though I'm certain the hall monitors of HN have already reported this egregious violation, demanding swift action on a Sunday morning. The rest of us just keep reading. Live and let live.
      - dcow 3y ago
        You can live and let live while also politely pointing out that the title is annoying and cumbersome in its current form, and consequently against the guidelines.
        cf100clunk 3y ago
        Some headlines absolutely must be ''editorialized'' to give context and clarity to HN readers. To wit: https://www.alamy.com/woman-has-baby-satirical-magazine-private-eye-front-page-26th-july-image66816569.html https://www.alamy.com/woman-has-baby-satirical-magazine-priv... The guidelines are sturdy enough while also being elastic as needed. Live and let live.
  - calmworm 3y ago
    “… please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize“ — from the HN guidelines. The guidelines are what keeps HN from becoming … something else.
  - xeromal 3y ago
    The title in it's current form tries to influence that opinion.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
    This isn't even a title though. It'a a comment by OP. I can't even find the source for the claim that "one company basically owns every font." The title is "Where do fonts come from? This one business, mostly" but it does not make clear who actually owns the fonts on myfonts.com. I suspect that the creator retains the copyright, but the article does not say so. From the monotype website[0] it seems I'm correct. So not only is the title editorialized, it is wrong or at least misleading. [0]https://foundrysupport.monotype.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048861171 https://foundrysupport.monotype.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048...
hannes0 3y ago
At least their name is well chosen
gjsman-1000 3y ago
I’m surprised more people here haven’t heard of them.
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  It's definitely a TIL moment for me, and a mind-blowing one at that.
strogonoff 3y ago
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.
- isanjay 3y ago
  Can you list out the fonts you like ?
  - overvale 3y ago
    Here are some of mine: https://mbtype.com/ https://mbtype.com/ https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ https://tosche.net/fonts https://tosche.net/fonts https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/ https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/
  - jxf 3y ago
    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/ https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ [1] https://fsd.it/wp-content/uploads/diagram.png.webp https://fsd.it/wp-content/uploads/diagram.png.webp
    - candiddevmike 3y ago
      What's the difference between app and website aside from the huge price increase?
      - jxf 3y ago
        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.
housemusicfan 3y ago
Are we supposed to be upset by this? That we're all slaves to Big Font? 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.
- Sunspark 3y ago
  There are plenty of good free fonts. 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.
- klodolph 3y ago
  Yeah. 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.
- pupppet 3y ago
  Whenever I consider Linux, I notice the shitty fonts and wonder what are its other glaring omissions. Probably an ignorant thought, but I can’t be alone.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    Especially in the past, but even also today, most Linux distributions have indeed installed by default shitty free fonts, which were the main reason why the GUI of a default Linux installation looked much uglier than that of a default Windows installation or of a default Mac OS installation. 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.
dfee 3y ago
I’m going to complain about cookie pop-ups, but see me out: https://veed.io/view/1a675b8d-cbc2-4c24-b10f-f91f7a0b8cfe https://veed.io/view/1a675b8d-cbc2-4c24-b10f-f91f7a0b8cfe That stuttering is me trying to scroll. When I finally can, I’ve been subject to a 10s penalty.
- wredue 3y ago
  That’s not cookie pop ups. That’s functional programming strategies poisoning the brains of developers causing them to believe that rewriting their page on every request is preferable because otherwise they have to think about “70,000 page states”. 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.
  - poorlyknit 3y ago
    > rewriting their page on every request 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.
    - wredue 3y ago
      Yeah. It’s not like functional programming is known for being slow, and every page adopting these ridiculous strategies has universally gotten worse and slower. Oh wait.
  - gedy 3y ago
    That page does not use React afaict, if that is what you are getting at.
- pwg 3y ago
  With Ublock Origin set to block all the Javascript, there are no cookie popups and no scroll breakage.
- 3y ago
terminous 3y ago
CTRL-F for "open source", no hits. What a glaring omission. There are tons of open, freely licensed fonts: https://fontesk.com/license/ofl-gpl/ https://fontesk.com/license/ofl-gpl/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rapnie 3y ago
  Ha. Nice touch, this one: https://fontesk.com/x-company-font/ https://fontesk.com/x-company-font/
- conkeisterdoor 3y ago
  Iosevka is a fantastic open-source font that's fully customizable. I have replaced the fixed font on all of my devices and apps to a custom Iosevka build I made, and I don't think I'll ever turn back. https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
- marc_io 3y ago
  Downloading and using fonts available on Fontesk can be a huge trap. Read it's “Licensing” page. It's simply not safe to use fonts downloaded there, one should really use it only for discovery, at best.
- hgs3 3y ago
  Google has an entire catalog of open source fonts [1]. [1] https://developers.google.com/fonts https://developers.google.com/fonts
tptacek 3y ago
The right title for this post is "Where do fonts come from? This one business, mostly". https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=editorialize%20author%3Adang&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- jxf 3y ago
  I love when searches are also answers.
tptacek 3y ago
Speaking as a type nerd: there is nothing in the universe less essential than a couture typeface. So what if Monotype obtains a monopoly on all of them?
irrational 3y ago
> Monotype endured financial difficulties and restructurings, eventually being acquired by the Boston private equity firm TA Associates in 2004 > 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)?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- voisin 3y ago
  > Can we just make private equity firms illegal? 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…
- fsloth 3y ago
  ”Private equity” in general may just mean some familys wealth -that may be managed in some unified manner. 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.
qawwads 3y ago
A few words toward the end for the ellusive ai menace, but zero word for the real, already existing, open source fonts. Nowaday I'll consider IBM Plex, Mozilla Fira or even Google Roboto before Monotype Anything.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Not least because Fira is really beautiful. Lato is another superb open licenced face.
- j16sdiz 3y ago
  For long text, sure. but most font are used for decorative use
replwoacause 3y ago
The site is completely unusable on iOS Safari
- kabr 3y ago
  It helps to use the Reader View
  - replwoacause 3y ago
    Thanks, I tried that though and it just kept force reloading the page and wouldn't stay in Reader View for longer than a few seconds.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  FWIW it works perfectly on iOS 17, with the caveat that I use 1Blocker and Rekt.
LinuxBender 3y ago
I've never really thought about this. Perhaps I missed it from the article and maybe this is a dumb question but is there a font that is truly open source, royalty free and recognized / built-in to browsers? Is there such a thing as a royalty free font family that the popular browsers would all recognize by name? Could that even become a legal battle? Monotype owns most major fonts: Arial, Helvetica, Gotham, Times New Roman. font-family:Open Sans,Arial font-family:monospace If I use any of those in HTML can someone claim royalties on my text? Should this concept itself become a font family? e.g. font-family:royalty-free and let the client decide on their favorites royalty-free fonts?
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  No. The OS platforms have broad system licences for those fonts; your readers will also have those licences. 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.
  - LinuxBender 3y ago
    Interesting. That has activated more questions in my noggin. Now I am more curious than anything how much each of the OS and browser vendors are paying in royalties. Beyond that of course there are browser forks usually managed by a handful of developers volunteering their time. Are those forks a legal ticking time bomb? I would be surprised if they strip out the code for the non system fonts.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      The browser will generally be relying on the system font renderer, so they kick that particular can down the road. 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 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)
II2II 3y ago
It appears as though the real problem is address near the end of the article under a heading that has nothing to do it: Monotype is switching to a subscription model that will likely weigh strongly in their own favor, and there is little that anyone can do about it since they are essentially a monopoly. 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).
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Making a font from one's own handwriting is an intriguing experience even if you don't go for cursive. 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.
  - thechao 3y ago
    Would you mind saying which app? I've always wanted to do this! EDIT: especially if it supports ligatures. I have some whacky ligatures that are distinctive to my handwriting.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      It was absolutely ages ago now, it might not still be around (I have a feeling it is one of the apps that didn't make it to 64 bit iOS). 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...
    - gcanyon 3y ago
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
This is, frankly, why one should approach all the "why should you use commercial, licensed fonts?" blog posts with a jaded eye. 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.
- jsmith99 3y ago
  There are plenty of excellent open source fonts with full glyph support and perfect kerning etc. But many are overused. If you use something like Raleway or other popular fonts, visitors will have a subconscious sense of familiarity and associations which you may or may not like. If you want something distinctive it's hard to avoid commercial fonts.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Or you can just assume that distinctive letter shapes are not a problem you need to go out of your way to solve, and move on with your life, right? 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!
    - 3y ago
gorgoiler 3y ago
How come these old typefaces like Helvetica and Gill Sans not in the public domain? The article mentions Helvetica being rolled in with one of Monotype’s purchases yet Helvetica is from the 1940s? 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?
- kstrauser 3y ago
  That last bit is my understanding: the typefaces are public domain, but the font files that describe them are protected.
- calgarymicro 3y ago
  It looks like[0] as of the start of this year, only works made in 1927 or earlier are in the public domain. Copyright terms have regularly been extended by Congress and they are astoundingly long now. [0]https://copyrightlately.com/public-domain-day-2023/ https://copyrightlately.com/public-domain-day-2023/
  - arrosenberg 3y ago
    Also known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act Thanks to Disney, this aspect of our economy and culture is completely broken.
    - HideousKojima 3y ago
      Cher gets a good chunk of the blame too
      - fsckboy 3y ago
        Sonny gets blame for the copyright extension act, but Cher's royalties lawsuit is not unreasonable or copying rights related... or did I misunderstand or miss something?
BLanen 3y ago
> In 1440, when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press Well, it starts wrong. We've been printing for quite a while already and he didn't even invent removable lead type.
op00to 3y ago
Article was unreadable on iOS, constantly reloading.
kyleyeats 3y ago
In a year you'll be able to use a custom new font for every project.
toyg 3y ago
> Much of their earnings go back to Monotype, which takes a 50% cut of every sale on its site. (Creative Market similarly takes a 50% commission fee, while Etsy charges 20 cents per listing and takes a 6.5% fee for every sale.) 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.
wcerfgba 3y ago
Every major brand is owned by a minority of multinational conglomerates. 90% of the money we spend in shops and online goes to a number of companies you could count on one hand. This issue is not restricted to fonts.
tiffanyh 3y ago
Eye glasses & lens. Even bigger than fonts, one company has a virtual monopoly on all eye glasses and lens. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica
- innocenat 3y ago
  I don't know. English fonts are used pretty much everywhere in the world. Luxottica, however, doesn't hold virtual monopoly in many regions.
  - tiffanyh 3y ago
    And Linux/Android is the most popular OS in the world and all of its included fonts are free (not using Monotype fonts). 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.
hannob 3y ago
I find this misleading. 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.
- omnimus 3y ago
  This is not true. We would have to define "practical use" but if you are looking at most used typefaces - things people see in around them the most it is dominated by commercial typefaces. It will be Helveticas, Arials, Times New Romans of the world. What people use in Word and Windows - all proprietary typefaces. Anything Apple - proprietary. Anything branded - brands usually typeface and that typeface is going to be proprietary - even on web. 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.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    > things people see in around them the most it is dominated by commercial typefaces 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.
    - 3y ago
bradley13 3y ago
Modern business strategy: buy up the competition, until you are effectively a monopoly. After that, start milking you position for all its worth. This is what antitrust legislation is supposed to prevent. But the regulators and politicians are asleep (or bought off).
zeroimpl 3y ago
Interesting. I use fonts.com which apparently is also Monotype. The illusion of a competitive market.
scoofy 3y ago
I wish someone would just use ML to pump out more fonts than we could ever need, none missing any characters because they could be constantly added to, and none of them would have copyright because they are ML created. I would buy that person a beer.
firecall 3y ago
Before the Internet, Fonts in the DTP world were two things: 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!
zx8080 3y ago
To be honest, I don't care much whether I see fancy proprietary rare font or the opensource one on a web site or a newspaper, or even in an app. I just need to see not awful letters to read words. 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.
AndriyKunitsyn 3y ago
The article fails to explain how the alleged monopoly of Monotype hurts smaller type foundries. Reads almost like a hit piece. There's some story about an independent author not having a legal team to protect from fonts stealing... d'uh. It's a comment on the US legal system, not on how bad Monotype is. 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.
maxslch 3y ago
i'm working as a digital product designer for over 4 years in an agency, never heard about monotype really, there are some amazing independent foundries which fonts we were buying + using free open source alternatives on the projects with less budget. Currently I'm creating a notion file with the best independent foundries and their typefaces so it's easy to discover, pick favourites and come back to that file for the next time you need to choose a font, I will also add best open source typefaces to it, but monotype won't be in there

327 points by kansaswriter 3y ago

PappGaborSandor 3y ago

[dead]

jwilk 3y ago

Please don't editorialize submission titles.

cf100clunk 3y ago
[flagged]
- j16sdiz 3y ago
  This is against the guidelines : > Please don't do things to make titles stand out, > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize
  - housemusicfan 3y ago
    Sometimes people color outside the lines. Though I'm certain the hall monitors of HN have already reported this egregious violation, demanding swift action on a Sunday morning. The rest of us just keep reading. Live and let live.
    - dcow 3y ago
      You can live and let live while also politely pointing out that the title is annoying and cumbersome in its current form, and consequently against the guidelines.
      - cf100clunk 3y ago
        Some headlines absolutely must be ''editorialized'' to give context and clarity to HN readers. To wit: https://www.alamy.com/woman-has-baby-satirical-magazine-private-eye-front-page-26th-july-image66816569.html https://www.alamy.com/woman-has-baby-satirical-magazine-priv... The guidelines are sturdy enough while also being elastic as needed. Live and let live.
- calmworm 3y ago
  “… please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize“ — from the HN guidelines. The guidelines are what keeps HN from becoming … something else.
- xeromal 3y ago
  The title in it's current form tries to influence that opinion.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
  This isn't even a title though. It'a a comment by OP. I can't even find the source for the claim that "one company basically owns every font." The title is "Where do fonts come from? This one business, mostly" but it does not make clear who actually owns the fonts on myfonts.com. I suspect that the creator retains the copyright, but the article does not say so. From the monotype website[0] it seems I'm correct. So not only is the title editorialized, it is wrong or at least misleading. [0]https://foundrysupport.monotype.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048861171 https://foundrysupport.monotype.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048...

hannes0 3y ago

At least their name is well chosen

gjsman-1000 3y ago

I’m surprised more people here haven’t heard of them.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago
It's definitely a TIL moment for me, and a mind-blowing one at that.

strogonoff 3y ago

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.

isanjay 3y ago
Can you list out the fonts you like ?
- overvale 3y ago
  Here are some of mine: https://mbtype.com/ https://mbtype.com/ https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ https://tosche.net/fonts https://tosche.net/fonts https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/ https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/
- jxf 3y ago
  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/ https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ [1] https://fsd.it/wp-content/uploads/diagram.png.webp https://fsd.it/wp-content/uploads/diagram.png.webp
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    What's the difference between app and website aside from the huge price increase?
    - jxf 3y ago
      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.

housemusicfan 3y ago

Are we supposed to be upset by this? That we're all slaves to Big Font? 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.

Sunspark 3y ago
There are plenty of good free fonts. 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.
klodolph 3y ago
Yeah. 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.
pupppet 3y ago
Whenever I consider Linux, I notice the shitty fonts and wonder what are its other glaring omissions. Probably an ignorant thought, but I can’t be alone.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  Especially in the past, but even also today, most Linux distributions have indeed installed by default shitty free fonts, which were the main reason why the GUI of a default Linux installation looked much uglier than that of a default Windows installation or of a default Mac OS installation. 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.

dfee 3y ago

I’m going to complain about cookie pop-ups, but see me out: https://veed.io/view/1a675b8d-cbc2-4c24-b10f-f91f7a0b8cfe https://veed.io/view/1a675b8d-cbc2-4c24-b10f-f91f7a0b8cfe That stuttering is me trying to scroll. When I finally can, I’ve been subject to a 10s penalty.

wredue 3y ago
That’s not cookie pop ups. That’s functional programming strategies poisoning the brains of developers causing them to believe that rewriting their page on every request is preferable because otherwise they have to think about “70,000 page states”. 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.
- poorlyknit 3y ago
  > rewriting their page on every request 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.
  - wredue 3y ago
    Yeah. It’s not like functional programming is known for being slow, and every page adopting these ridiculous strategies has universally gotten worse and slower. Oh wait.
- gedy 3y ago
  That page does not use React afaict, if that is what you are getting at.
pwg 3y ago
With Ublock Origin set to block all the Javascript, there are no cookie popups and no scroll breakage.
3y ago

terminous 3y ago

CTRL-F for "open source", no hits. What a glaring omission. There are tons of open, freely licensed fonts: https://fontesk.com/license/ofl-gpl/ https://fontesk.com/license/ofl-gpl/

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rapnie 3y ago
Ha. Nice touch, this one: https://fontesk.com/x-company-font/ https://fontesk.com/x-company-font/
conkeisterdoor 3y ago
Iosevka is a fantastic open-source font that's fully customizable. I have replaced the fixed font on all of my devices and apps to a custom Iosevka build I made, and I don't think I'll ever turn back. https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
marc_io 3y ago
Downloading and using fonts available on Fontesk can be a huge trap. Read it's “Licensing” page. It's simply not safe to use fonts downloaded there, one should really use it only for discovery, at best.
hgs3 3y ago
Google has an entire catalog of open source fonts [1]. [1] https://developers.google.com/fonts https://developers.google.com/fonts

tptacek 3y ago

The right title for this post is "Where do fonts come from? This one business, mostly". https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=editorialize%20author%3Adang&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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jxf 3y ago
I love when searches are also answers.

tptacek 3y ago

Speaking as a type nerd: there is nothing in the universe less essential than a couture typeface. So what if Monotype obtains a monopoly on all of them?

irrational 3y ago

> Monotype endured financial difficulties and restructurings, eventually being acquired by the Boston private equity firm TA Associates in 2004 > 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)?

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voisin 3y ago
> Can we just make private equity firms illegal? 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…
fsloth 3y ago
”Private equity” in general may just mean some familys wealth -that may be managed in some unified manner. 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.

qawwads 3y ago

A few words toward the end for the ellusive ai menace, but zero word for the real, already existing, open source fonts. Nowaday I'll consider IBM Plex, Mozilla Fira or even Google Roboto before Monotype Anything.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Not least because Fira is really beautiful. Lato is another superb open licenced face.
j16sdiz 3y ago
For long text, sure. but most font are used for decorative use

replwoacause 3y ago

The site is completely unusable on iOS Safari

kabr 3y ago
It helps to use the Reader View
- replwoacause 3y ago
  Thanks, I tried that though and it just kept force reloading the page and wouldn't stay in Reader View for longer than a few seconds.
CharlesW 3y ago
FWIW it works perfectly on iOS 17, with the caveat that I use 1Blocker and Rekt.

LinuxBender 3y ago

I've never really thought about this. Perhaps I missed it from the article and maybe this is a dumb question but is there a font that is truly open source, royalty free and recognized / built-in to browsers? Is there such a thing as a royalty free font family that the popular browsers would all recognize by name? Could that even become a legal battle? Monotype owns most major fonts: Arial, Helvetica, Gotham, Times New Roman. font-family:Open Sans,Arial font-family:monospace If I use any of those in HTML can someone claim royalties on my text? Should this concept itself become a font family? e.g. font-family:royalty-free and let the client decide on their favorites royalty-free fonts?

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
No. The OS platforms have broad system licences for those fonts; your readers will also have those licences. 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.
- LinuxBender 3y ago
  Interesting. That has activated more questions in my noggin. Now I am more curious than anything how much each of the OS and browser vendors are paying in royalties. Beyond that of course there are browser forks usually managed by a handful of developers volunteering their time. Are those forks a legal ticking time bomb? I would be surprised if they strip out the code for the non system fonts.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    The browser will generally be relying on the system font renderer, so they kick that particular can down the road. 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 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)

II2II 3y ago

It appears as though the real problem is address near the end of the article under a heading that has nothing to do it: Monotype is switching to a subscription model that will likely weigh strongly in their own favor, and there is little that anyone can do about it since they are essentially a monopoly. 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).

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Making a font from one's own handwriting is an intriguing experience even if you don't go for cursive. 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.
- thechao 3y ago
  Would you mind saying which app? I've always wanted to do this! EDIT: especially if it supports ligatures. I have some whacky ligatures that are distinctive to my handwriting.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    It was absolutely ages ago now, it might not still be around (I have a feeling it is one of the apps that didn't make it to 64 bit iOS). 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...
  - gcanyon 3y ago

bemusedthrow75 3y ago

This is, frankly, why one should approach all the "why should you use commercial, licensed fonts?" blog posts with a jaded eye. 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.

jsmith99 3y ago
There are plenty of excellent open source fonts with full glyph support and perfect kerning etc. But many are overused. If you use something like Raleway or other popular fonts, visitors will have a subconscious sense of familiarity and associations which you may or may not like. If you want something distinctive it's hard to avoid commercial fonts.
- tptacek 3y ago
  Or you can just assume that distinctive letter shapes are not a problem you need to go out of your way to solve, and move on with your life, right? 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!
  - 3y ago

gorgoiler 3y ago

How come these old typefaces like Helvetica and Gill Sans not in the public domain? The article mentions Helvetica being rolled in with one of Monotype’s purchases yet Helvetica is from the 1940s? 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?

kstrauser 3y ago
That last bit is my understanding: the typefaces are public domain, but the font files that describe them are protected.
calgarymicro 3y ago
It looks like[0] as of the start of this year, only works made in 1927 or earlier are in the public domain. Copyright terms have regularly been extended by Congress and they are astoundingly long now. [0]https://copyrightlately.com/public-domain-day-2023/ https://copyrightlately.com/public-domain-day-2023/
- arrosenberg 3y ago
  Also known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act Thanks to Disney, this aspect of our economy and culture is completely broken.
  - HideousKojima 3y ago
    Cher gets a good chunk of the blame too
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      Sonny gets blame for the copyright extension act, but Cher's royalties lawsuit is not unreasonable or copying rights related... or did I misunderstand or miss something?

BLanen 3y ago

> In 1440, when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press Well, it starts wrong. We've been printing for quite a while already and he didn't even invent removable lead type.

op00to 3y ago

Article was unreadable on iOS, constantly reloading.

kyleyeats 3y ago

In a year you'll be able to use a custom new font for every project.

toyg 3y ago

> Much of their earnings go back to Monotype, which takes a 50% cut of every sale on its site. (Creative Market similarly takes a 50% commission fee, while Etsy charges 20 cents per listing and takes a 6.5% fee for every sale.) 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.

wcerfgba 3y ago

Every major brand is owned by a minority of multinational conglomerates. 90% of the money we spend in shops and online goes to a number of companies you could count on one hand. This issue is not restricted to fonts.

tiffanyh 3y ago

Eye glasses & lens. Even bigger than fonts, one company has a virtual monopoly on all eye glasses and lens. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica

innocenat 3y ago
I don't know. English fonts are used pretty much everywhere in the world. Luxottica, however, doesn't hold virtual monopoly in many regions.
- tiffanyh 3y ago
  And Linux/Android is the most popular OS in the world and all of its included fonts are free (not using Monotype fonts). 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.

hannob 3y ago

I find this misleading. 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.

omnimus 3y ago
This is not true. We would have to define "practical use" but if you are looking at most used typefaces - things people see in around them the most it is dominated by commercial typefaces. It will be Helveticas, Arials, Times New Romans of the world. What people use in Word and Windows - all proprietary typefaces. Anything Apple - proprietary. Anything branded - brands usually typeface and that typeface is going to be proprietary - even on web. 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.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > things people see in around them the most it is dominated by commercial typefaces 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.
  - 3y ago

bradley13 3y ago

Modern business strategy: buy up the competition, until you are effectively a monopoly. After that, start milking you position for all its worth. This is what antitrust legislation is supposed to prevent. But the regulators and politicians are asleep (or bought off).

zeroimpl 3y ago

Interesting. I use fonts.com which apparently is also Monotype. The illusion of a competitive market.

scoofy 3y ago

I wish someone would just use ML to pump out more fonts than we could ever need, none missing any characters because they could be constantly added to, and none of them would have copyright because they are ML created. I would buy that person a beer.

firecall 3y ago

Before the Internet, Fonts in the DTP world were two things: 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!

zx8080 3y ago

To be honest, I don't care much whether I see fancy proprietary rare font or the opensource one on a web site or a newspaper, or even in an app. I just need to see not awful letters to read words. 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.

AndriyKunitsyn 3y ago

The article fails to explain how the alleged monopoly of Monotype hurts smaller type foundries. Reads almost like a hit piece. There's some story about an independent author not having a legal team to protect from fonts stealing... d'uh. It's a comment on the US legal system, not on how bad Monotype is. 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.

maxslch 3y ago

i'm working as a digital product designer for over 4 years in an agency, never heard about monotype really, there are some amazing independent foundries which fonts we were buying + using free open source alternatives on the projects with less budget. Currently I'm creating a notion file with the best independent foundries and their typefaces so it's easy to discover, pick favourites and come back to that file for the next time you need to choose a font, I will also add best open source typefaces to it, but monotype won't be in there