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You wouldn't steal a font

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Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#171

Post by Macha »

Suppafly wrote: post #63
shadowgovt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF is a famously (and hilariously) wild document format because it satisfied the need of being able to recreate a work piece faithfully using thousands of kinds of outputs, some of which didn't even exist when the document was created, to ideally arbitrary pixel resolution (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbCniw-BcW0 for a delightful and informative talk including this topic). As a result, in one of the modes of…

>Sure! But what else are you going to do if your document uses a super-special font for displaying mathematical symbols or sanskrit or the glyphs of a language understood by fifty people on the planet and Unicode isn't widely adopted yet, having been invented just two years before PDF? Assuming it's for print/display and not future editing, I imagine you could convert the font strokes to vectors or similar.

In fact many PDFs still do convert the text to shapes rather than use the font. It does cause problems when you need to copy text out though

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#172

Post by gkoberger »

tptacek wrote: post #161
gkoberger wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect you a ton (genuinely, I think you're the most interesting writer in the tech space), but you have a profound misunderstanding of the importance of typography if you think the only reason you'd need a paid typeface is the same reason you'd need a Hermes bag. I know you're a curious person, so hopefully you take this as an opportunity to open your horizons on the importance of it.

I'm a typeface nerd. Bringhurst is one of 3 books on the end-table next to me right now. I spend a stupid amount of money for Hoefler fonts for my dumb blog. This to me is like the Menswear Guy on Twitter, who will explain in very great detail to you why the Hermès product is significantly better than the generic alternative. He's right, but he also understands that you buy the Hermès product to make a statement. Spe…

Then we aren't disagreeing. I never said anything about stealing or piracy; I agree with you that not being able to afford something doesn't give you the right to take it.

I think we're responding to different things. You're upset the original person mentioned piracy, whereas I took their rant to be more about licensing changes being yet another way companies are creeping up prices from one-time-purchase to rent-forever. You used to be able to pay for a font and use it in a magazine, but now you have to pay per impression.

And moreso, I'm annoyed by most of the comments saying that the free fonts on your computer should be enough.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#173

Post by Animats »

What happens if you present an image of a page in some font to an LLM, and ask it to make you a font file for that font? An LLM could probably not only do that, but create matching characters for ones not already present.

Oh, and tell it to fix the kerning.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#174

Post by kevingadd »

tptacek wrote: post #92
phony-account wrote: post #24

Is this the wrong time to rant about font licensing though? I’ve always bought and paid for fonts, but as I’ve gradually transitioned to mobile app development, I one day realized that all the fonts I bought for print are now worthless to me. These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price. But if your hobby is making apps, then suddenly the same font…

There is maybe nothing in the entire world that I am less sympathetic towards than the cause of font piracy / font liberation. You have perfectly good --- in fact, historically excellent --- fonts loaded by default for free on any computer you buy today. Arguing for the oppression of font licenses is, to me, like arguing about how much it costs to buy something at Hermès. Just don't shop at Hermès.

The fonts loaded on one machine are typically not loaded reliably on all machines, so you need to distribute fonts with your application. Doing this is probably a violation of the license that all those "free fonts" were distributed under, so your only options are:

1. Public Domain Fonts

2. Fonts that cost money

The set of public domain fonts is pretty small and most of them are low quality - not all, thankfully - and out of the ones that don't suck a lot of them only support the latin character set.

As for fonts that cost money, just to give you one example, I recently asked a foundry what it would cost to license a font for my indie game. Their quote was $1100/yr with a ceiling of 300k copies sold (so I'd need to come back and pay them more on a yearly basis and the cost would go up if I was successful). This was only for 3 variants - regular, italic and medium - and only for the latin character set. For one typeface.

Certainly if I was throwing around millions of dollars I could pay that without blinking, but it's far out of reach for independent developers (and they know I'm independent)

Lots of games distribute "baked fonts", where the ttf/otf is statically rendered into a bunch of texture atlases and they ship the atlases instead of the font. Many font licenses I've seen don't permit this kind of use, so I suspect a lot of games are actually in violation of their font licenses, if they paid to license their fonts at all.

Hell, just the other day I prepared a PowerPoint presentation for work using one of the stock Office fonts and then I opened it in Office on another machine and the font was missing...

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#175

Post by floriankarsten »

weinzierl wrote: post #58
EvanAnderson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US you can't copyright the shape of a font. You can copyright the programmatic description of a font. Design patents have been awarded for fonts. Trademark and trade dress protections could apply to the specific use of a font but not the font itself. The name of a font itself can be protected by trademark, as well. It's kind of a fascinating topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti..…

In the 90s Corel Draw came with a Helvetica named Swiss. Microsoft wasn't as bold and called theirs Arial.

[dead]

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#176

Post by gkoberger »

wubrr wrote: post #163
gkoberger wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think we're just looking at it from different perspectives. Yes, most people are fine choosing from the fonts available on their computer when writing a document. But that's not what me nor OP are talking about. We're talking about shipping software (like a mobile app), or publishing a blog post. In that case, the best you can specify is either a very common font (Helvetica, etc), or a high-level classification…

> There are many free fonts out there, yes, but there's a reason they're free. Go on and tell me what that reason is then. Are you also going to tell me free open-source software, like Linux is low-quality because its free? > The quality for a majority of them is significantly lower Again, a completely baseless, unprovable assertion. > You don't have to agree, but I'm not being absurd or lacking sincerity. What do yo…

I'm not going to argue with you, but I just want to point out that the person I was responding to specifically used the phrase "system supported fonts". That's why I mentioned Calibri.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#177

Post by shadowgovt »

Suppafly wrote: post #63
shadowgovt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF is a famously (and hilariously) wild document format because it satisfied the need of being able to recreate a work piece faithfully using thousands of kinds of outputs, some of which didn't even exist when the document was created, to ideally arbitrary pixel resolution (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbCniw-BcW0 for a delightful and informative talk including this topic). As a result, in one of the modes of…

>Sure! But what else are you going to do if your document uses a super-special font for displaying mathematical symbols or sanskrit or the glyphs of a language understood by fifty people on the planet and Unicode isn't widely adopted yet, having been invented just two years before PDF? Assuming it's for print/display and not future editing, I imagine you could convert the font strokes to vectors or similar.

You could. But in a thousand page document, that's a lot of memory used up to record a vector for every letter 'c'. So of course you do two layers: record modifiers and transforms on a canonical 'c', and then keep a canonical 'c' somewhere with all the other letters.

... But you already have that data structure: it's the font file itself.

(Possibly worth noting here also is that historically, Adobe owned both the PDF format and the file format for most popular fonts. So they were heavily incentivized to just reuse code they already owned here instead of reinventing a wheel).

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#178

Post by [deleted] »

gkoberger wrote: post #160
tptacek wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, those things aren't comparable. Truffles have a functional role in a dish. A typeface does not have a meaningful functional role in a document, compared to the high-quality freely-available alternatives. This is like complaining about some kind of specially-carved or dyed truffle.

I respect you a ton (genuinely, I think you're the most interesting writer in the tech space), but you have a profound misunderstanding of the importance of typography if you think the only reason you'd need a paid typeface is the same reason you'd need a Hermes bag. I know you're a curious person, so hopefully you take this as an opportunity to open your horizons on the importance of it.

[deleted]

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#179

Post by wubrr »

gkoberger wrote: post #176
wubrr wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are many free fonts out there, yes, but there's a reason they're free. Go on and tell me what that reason is then. Are you also going to tell me free open-source software, like Linux is low-quality because its free? > The quality for a majority of them is significantly lower Again, a completely baseless, unprovable assertion. > You don't have to agree, but I'm not being absurd or lacking sincerity. What do yo…

I'm not going to argue with you, but I just want to point out that the person I was responding to specifically used the phrase "system supported fonts". That's why I mentioned Calibri.

No, what the person you responded to said was:

> '..freely available and/or system supported fonts.'

Not just 'system supported fonts' (whatever that means), and not just Calibri. That's why your 'use Calibri for everything' example is absurd and does not at all address the point they made.

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