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Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

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Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#191

Post by martin_a »

aendruk wrote: post #181
martin_a wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exact thing happened to us, too. Bought a font from a small foundry which then got acquired by Monotype two years down the road. They started questioning us and assumed we had pirated the font. Send them the old receipt and told them politely to fuck off. Never heard of them again luckily.

Is there any legal obligation to send them the old receipt? I’d be tempted to just let them waste their time on it more.

Not sure, probably depends on how resilient your company and staff is. :-D

Marketing got very nervous though and wouldn't calm down, so I sent the receipt.

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#192

Post by junon »

atomicfiredoll wrote: post #117
junon wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my anecdotal, completely unfounded theory. Serif fonts were used in print media for ages but when computers came around sans serif became significantly more popular as no longer was there the legibility concern with dodgy pigment applicators etc. People started to switch to sans serif fonts more and more and would seek out an alternative to the widely defaulted Times New Roman in early days. They'd open the al…

The general public was often using Times New Roman or whatever their system's default sans serif font was. But, designers have cared about things like this for a very long time (ages, as you said.) Arial is joined at the hip with Helvetica, which got a movie[1] because of it's massive cultural impact and it's praise within design circles. Among professional designers, there were very strong opinions on Helvetica and…

Ah yeah I had totally forgotten about Helvetica having such a history. Though I wonder what you mean by putting Arial in that position deliberately - if it was alphabetical (which I remember it being) do you mean that Arial was named as such that it started with A?

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#193

Post by mattkevan »

martin_a wrote: post #191
aendruk wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any legal obligation to send them the old receipt? I’d be tempted to just let them waste their time on it more.

Not sure, probably depends on how resilient your company and staff is. :-D Marketing got very nervous though and wouldn't calm down, so I sent the receipt.

First place I worked at where we got audited, Monotype presented us with a bill in the high six figures. It came as a surprise as the entire product and tech team had turned over at least three times since it was set up and no-one knew anything about it.

It turned out we had got licences, but not for anywhere near the billions of pageviews we were putting through.

We quickly switched the fonts to open source analogues and got the legal team involved. The final bill was much less than their opening bid but still a lot. It would have been much more expensive if we hadn’t had the resources to negotiate.

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#194

Post by flutteringfool »

dryark wrote: post #147
oliwarner wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Scan a book in public domain, feed into an online font generation service, pay somebody to clean it up. A few hours later, you have a font you can use how you like. Is it as good? Probably not, but it's much cheaper. Edit: oh look https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127400

Yes. I did see that other article. No the process we are using is not using AI. We are not using OCR either. We are using computational geometry and forensics methodology. No flatbed scanners. No sheet fed scanners. This isn't like anything ever done before. It's entirely different and higher quality than any result you can get through AI or OCR. I do agree that detailed work is required to do it correctly and produc…

Wow that sounds incredible. I'm super into fonts, I understand the proprietary nature but if OCR isn't used and neither is flatbed scanning, does that mean the 3D model is obtained? I can't think of another method.

It's very cool, would love to see some fonts you have available whenever it's out!

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#195

Post by dryark »

flutteringfool wrote: post #194
dryark wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I did see that other article. No the process we are using is not using AI. We are not using OCR either. We are using computational geometry and forensics methodology. No flatbed scanners. No sheet fed scanners. This isn't like anything ever done before. It's entirely different and higher quality than any result you can get through AI or OCR. I do agree that detailed work is required to do it correctly and produc…

Wow that sounds incredible. I'm super into fonts, I understand the proprietary nature but if OCR isn't used and neither is flatbed scanning, does that mean the 3D model is obtained? I can't think of another method. It's very cool, would love to see some fonts you have available whenever it's out!

The initial input is high resolution images using a DSLR and a macro lens, or at least it will be soon. Initial testing of the method has been done using 200mp images taken casually with a standard modern cell phone.

The underlying new computational geometry method can be extended to 3d but that isn't necessary for this application unless we also extract a 3d image of the page itself. For now at least we are not doing that as it would be even more complicated and finicky. Possibly for soft enough pages the letterpress imprint will deform the page enough that the deformation can be detected and help figure out where the original metal pressed and where the ink is due to page bleed.

Essentially what we are doing is taking high resolution photos, using computational geometry methods on those to extract the shapes, and then refining those shapes through a mixture of automation and manual labor.

The entire thing is called "Donkey Free" and will have information online in the near future. I just bought the domain ( donkeyfree.com ) for this 2 days ago; this is all extremely new. I'd like to release the resulting fonts under a license allowing free use for many purposes but we still need to think through that to figure out how to make that sustainable.

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#196

Post by ammo1662 »

Macha wrote: post #168
eloisant wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same for some non-Japanese games who don't take the time to think it through, worse case scenario is when they use Chinese fonts. Because Japanese and Chinese characters are slightly different, but Unicode decided to unify them under the same codes.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs

The same happens in reverse sometimes, e.g. the super skinny font in final fantasy pixel remasters: https://images.rpgsite.net/image/da49c9a1/102696/original/FF... Ironically, they had a better Latin font _in the Japanese language version_ for all the genre loan abbreviations like MP/HP/LV etc., ( https://terimaland.com/Memory/Steam_FinalFantasyPixelRemaste... ) so that image is comparing the modded in Japanese Latin…

They look like half-width characters. This is a historical issue, not a font style issue. You can check:

https://mailmate.jp/blog/half-width-full-width-hankaku-zenka...

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#197

Post by Aachen »

account42 wrote: post #133
teraflop wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're making a work of art (such as a game) you don't just want any old font, you want one that serves a particular aesthetic purpose. If you've picked a typeface, and designed other UI elements that look good in conjunction with it, but suddenly that typeface becomes unaffordable, then you have to do some work to find an alternative that's still acceptable. In particular, game UI tends to be designed around th…

If you are creating a work of art that depends on a continued business relationship with others, especially one without solid contracts that won't let them change pricing on you, then you have no one else to blame but yourself.

I think we all depend on stable markets in one way or another

E.g. supermarkets suddenly charging the hundredfold amount? → Should have started a farm or made solid contracts if you didn't want be be dependant...

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#198

Post by omnimus »

mattkevan wrote: post #93
omnimus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Monotype but HGGC, private equity firm from Palo Alto that has bought Monotype and every other type foundry they can get their hands on. They likely have strategy to completely corner the market and then turn things up. But as I wrote here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973261#45977078 Besides open source fonts there still are stable high quality independent foundries that are safe to use as they wou…

Some really good options there. I did a deep dive a while back looking for small, independent, mostly European type foundries. There’s an incredible range of talent out there. Will never give Monotype and the like another penny.

The problem is soon you will not even know which fonts are owned by Monotype/HGGC. For example they bought Colophon and Sharp type two famous independent foundries. When buying their fonts it still seems like they are independent.

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#199

Post by cloverich »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #153
mattkevan wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a wild take. Might as well ask why anyone should pay for anything once it's been made. While it's possible to commission a custom font and many companies do eg. Apple, IBM, Airbnb, Bytedance, Vercel, Github, Mozilla etc. Some even make them open source. However it's not really a viable option for anyone other than the largest organisations as it's far more expensive and time-consuming than just getting a licence…

> Might as well ask why anyone should pay for anything once it's been made. Nothing wild about it. That's simply the reality of intellectual work. Only the first copy need ever be paid for. That is the true cost of creation. The cost of all subsequent copies is approximately $0 with 21st century computer technology. All intellectual work is information. All information is bits. All sequences of bits are numbers. All…

Information is the product of intellectual work (among other things); it is composed of bits but is not itself bits.

We aren't paying for the bits.

Re: Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k

#200

Post by flutteringfool »

dryark wrote: post #195
flutteringfool wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that sounds incredible. I'm super into fonts, I understand the proprietary nature but if OCR isn't used and neither is flatbed scanning, does that mean the 3D model is obtained? I can't think of another method. It's very cool, would love to see some fonts you have available whenever it's out!

The initial input is high resolution images using a DSLR and a macro lens, or at least it will be soon. Initial testing of the method has been done using 200mp images taken casually with a standard modern cell phone. The underlying new computational geometry method can be extended to 3d but that isn't necessary for this application unless we also extract a 3d image of the page itself. For now at least we are not doin…

Sounds great, best of luck! Hope you make a Show HN post when it's ready
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