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You wouldn't steal a font

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Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#411

Post by tasuki »

kevingadd wrote: post #409
tasuki wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? There's an endless supply of permissively licensed fonts, eg on Google Fonts. Many of them are actually pretty good. Yes, you'll find some bad ones too.

You should carefully check the license of each font on Google Fonts. They're not all under the same license. Yes, many of them are permissively licensed, but that doesn't mean you have the right to redistribute the ttf/otf file yourself as part of an application, since you need to comply with the terms of the license as it is written.

Ah, I thought they were all permissively licensed! Good to know. Can I at least distribute the woff2 of each?

Is there any common thing that I can do with all the Google fonts? I suppose I can at least look to them from a website? But not necessarily self-host?

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#412

Post by Chaosvex »

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 These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price.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…

Interesting that nobody brought up Discord, who recently(-ish) changed the typeface for chat messages in favour of a worse alternative, allegedly to avoid licensing costs.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#413

Post by behringer »

robertlagrant wrote: post #306
behringer wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why are the fonts so expensive?

> Then why are the fonts so expensive? Because they're considered important, and definitely take a long time to make. Try making one.

apparently not so important that "a custom font isn’t going to be the deciding factor in whether your next AI powered social graph app sinks or floats."

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#414

Post by zvr »

shadowgovt wrote: post #23
tiffanyh wrote: post #11

Can someone explain to me how you determine if a font is ripped/stolen? I was under the impression that fonts are just a collection of line arc/points. So is this a probabilistic comparison in that, if all of the line arc/points match another font - the chances are high it was ripped?

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…

Actually the PDF does not contain "the entire font file for every font used" but only a subset, containing the definitions of only the characters (glyphs) being used in the document.

That's why the font appears not as "XBANDRough" but as "+"; this indicates it's only a subset of the original font.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#416

Post by mbonnet »

tptacek wrote: post #376
readbeard wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is that Monotype has a bit of a monopoly in the upper segment of the market though right? I know they're not the only players, but it feels like they've vacuumed up enough small, successful foundries that they now control enough of the market that they can get away with the kind of aggressive behavior that wouldn't be tenable in a healthier, more competitive marketplace. From Wikipedia [0] > Via a…

Serious question: who cares? There is no scarcity of high quality fonts (there are more of them available to ordinary people today than at any point in history). So they control Hoefler. If that's a problem for you, don't use Hoefler faces.

You're missing a key thing: font face is an artistic choice. The current situation around font licensing is akin to one guy "owning" a color.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#417

Post by robertlagrant »

pc86 wrote: post #339
mark-r wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention that it's almost impossible to make a living designing fonts.

Maybe "this font is offensively priced to the point where I immediately think the person selling it is a criminal using this for money laundering, or clinically insane" and "it's hard to sell enough fonts to live off of" are related? Maybe if charlatans didn't say with a straight face that a font should be sold on a subscription model they'd sell more? Maybe if it didn't cost as much as a car they'd sell more?

The people who make and sell fonts are probably the best people to be setting the price, and have tried lots of options.

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#418

Post by tptacek »

mbonnet wrote: post #416
tptacek wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: who cares? There is no scarcity of high quality fonts (there are more of them available to ordinary people today than at any point in history). So they control Hoefler. If that's a problem for you, don't use Hoefler faces.

You're missing a key thing: font face is an artistic choice. The current situation around font licensing is akin to one guy "owning" a color. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack

No it's not. It's nothing at all like owning a color. A color is a property of nature. It's not an "artistic choice".

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#419

Post by kiitos »

wyager wrote: post #410
scripturial wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much anyone coding in another language. Coders do sometimes buy fonts if they are into fonts and nice terminals.

To reiterate the original question: "what percentage"?

What do you think are "random obscure glyphs"? Is the Turkish lowercase 'i' (ı) one of them? What about the German Eszett (ß)? Is 'ö' a random obscure glyph? What about 'ø'?

Re: You wouldn't steal a font

#420

Post by wyager »

kiitos wrote: post #419
wyager wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To reiterate the original question: "what percentage"?

What do you think are "random obscure glyphs"? Is the Turkish lowercase 'i' (ı) one of them? What about the German Eszett (ß)? Is 'ö' a random obscure glyph? What about 'ø'?

Yes, those are obscure and unlikely to naturally show up in monospace texts.

What percentage of computer programs do you think are written in turkish?

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