161–170 of 197 posts
So what happened to the hacker news page and the new font (is it something wrong with my browser, but things look a bit different last few days)
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Paying for products per se is not a problem. What always becomes a problem are stuff like unfair pricing, surge pricing, extortionate rates and fees backed up by monopoly/DRM/regulations, recurring subscriptions or ever increasing rates for the same product with no meaningful improvement and so on. Fonts can be sold but pricing calculated per page view and device just strikes me as a bit too much. Why not just sell t…
Why are so many formerly desktop applications sold individually per major version now sold as subscription services delivered online through the browser? The answer is the same.
A subscription provides ongoing revenue to the developer/publisher, but in the case of software, that revenue is (theoretically) being used to fund ongoing development of the product. Whether this is better for users than the traditional paid upgrade model is debatable, but there's undeniably value to the developer in a predictable revenue stream, and as long as the subscription price isn't totally out of whack compared to the old upgrade model I don't mind it. Assuming the developer is keeping up their end of the bargain, so to speak, and making regular releases of the software, then it's perfectly reasonable for you to keep paying for those releases.
But fonts are mostly a different matter. It's vanishingly rare for there to be more than tiny tweaks to a digital release of a typeface after its initial release. Unless I'm paying for someone else to host web fonts for me -- which Helvetica Now's web font license doesn't seem to entail -- this seems to be considerably more usurious. Print magazines weren't charged an annual cost for their typefaces based on their circulation; web fonts should really be no different.
I hope Knuth is smiling that Metafont-style procedural fonts are winning in the end after decades of haters :D.
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I'm sure you're a big hit at all of the design meetings! How dare the devs tell the marketing/graphics people what they can and cannot do. Becareful, or they'll shove GA/AMP down at you in response!
Fonts adversely affect page load speeds for no good reason, most users don’t even notice or care about these custom fonts. It’s far better for the bottom line to have a fast page. So they can bitch all they want, but at the end of the day, code is king. So bend the knee .
lol what...
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How does this work? Normally I download and install TTF files and install them on my computer. How are licensed fonts work? Is there some kind of proprietary installation?
If you (the end user) download and install a font on your machine, or buy an OS with it pre-installed, then you (the end user) are paying the licensing for it. If you (the website operator) link to a font from your CSS file so end users' browsers will download and render text with it, then you (the website operator) are paying the licensing fees.
Am I crazy for expecting fonts to be free? There are so many good options that I can use without paying a license fee. I can't imagine liking the tiny differences in a font so much that I would get myself locked into a yearly licensing fee.
Fantastic font, now infinitely malleable! Unfortunately it is expensive, and you can't just buy it and use it, you have to renew the license annually. https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/helvetica-now-variable?tab... And my use case isn't even covered: include in a web application that will be downloaded and installed by customers. My current choice is OpenSans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans
> And my use case isn't even covered: include in a web application that will be downloaded and installed by customers. My current choice is OpenSans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans My God if you didn't tee this up perfectly: https://web.archive.org/web/20090422173924/http://diveintoma... > FUCK THE FOUNDRIES > Seriously. Fuck them. They still think they’re in the business of shuffling little bits of metal…
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Another great option and my current favorite is the Source Family from Adobe. They are open source and variable, and have a full family of Serif, Sans and Monospace fonts. https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-serif https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro
I used Source Code Pro all the time until I found out about Comic Mono.
I had a proper look at it after that. It isn't even half bad. I never disliked comic sans for the use cases it was intended for, and a derived coding font is a fun project.