Your favourite font choices

[Van Dalton]

In a résumé prep course I had to take in college one of the things they stressed is to absolutely NEVER, EVER use Comic Sans MS, Technical or (gag) Wingdings if you expect to be taken seriously. Not sure why they even had to bring it up since it should have been readily obvious and nobody with any common sense would do that, but evidently somebody somewhere must have tried it. Ironically they stressed favouring Times New Roman and Aerial over others. Again, who knows why; those are probably the last fonts I'd ever choose for professional business documents like résumés. I guess it takes all kinds.

Trajan was never my "preferred font." Not sure what your roll-eyes emoji is about, especially when the reaction is to something I posted 19 years ago.

Dude, you know I was totally screwing with you. I was playing on how sick of Trajan you were back then. That's not the "rolleyes" icon but the "uhoh" icon , indicating a sense of impending doom. No need to take it personally or even seriously.

Anyone remember those "Key Fonts" CD-ROMs in the value software aisle? The number of fonts bundled into any kind of office productivity application or graphics software was a good bullet point to print on the retail box. Fonts were more of a novelty to general purpose computer users back then. So, yeah, if someone spent $20 on a CD with 500 knock-off fonts he was probably going to try to use a bunch of them. File sharing sites on the Internet killed some of the business model for retail font software packages to sell in stores.

Yes, and I think I may actually still have the couple that I picked up in junior high school in the late 90s. Only they weren't called "Key Fonts, I think one was "1000 Fabulous Fonts" (really just mostly Alltype conversions of name-brand payware ones) and another one was a collection of graphics fonts.

Funny how quaint those seem today. There are sites like Mufonts and Font Empire that have hundreds of thousands of (real, not knockoff!) fonts for free download (some are pirateware, but who cares). Yet as a zit-faced 14 year old nerd with a Pentium II and a 4 GB hard drive and no life, hobbies or fe/male counterpart, 1000 fonts on a CD seemed enormous.

[Bobby Henderson]

The fact that you actually need to buy and/or license fonts for your usage scenario is something that a lot of people don't even know. Even those fonts that are offered "Free to Download" may come with caveats, like that they're only free for non-professional use. Most people don't even know there are different versions of fonts. Heck, most don't even know what a font family is and will happily use the faux italic version of any given font.

The whole thing can turn into a quite a deep rabbit hole.

There are not only different versions of the same typeface design, but they may be different apart from each other in subtle ways. If a store front channel letter sign set in Futura gets damaged by hail it will be a real adventure for us to match the letters unless we have the original art files. Multiple vendors have their own versions of Futura (Linotype, Bitstream, URW, Tilde, Neufville Digital, Monotype, etc). None are exact carbon copies of each other. They look the same. But when you set something like a letter "E" set in Bitstream Futura Bold over the top of a "E" set in Monotype's Futura Now they don't line up exactly.

Then there's all the knock-off fonts. Helvetica has a around a dozen or more "Helveti-clones." Fonts like Nimbus Sans, Swiss 721 BT and CG Triumvirate are examples. Even among actual Helvetica-named fonts various releases through the years will have subtle differences in the outlines or changes in the character sets.

Buying and/or licensing fonts can be its own rabbit hole too. We buy new type families on occasion to keep things "fresh." It's a hazard to rely on something like a font bundle in CorelDRAW. Even though that collection has around 1000 fonts it is rarely updated and it getting pretty stale. The Adobe Fonts service in Creative Cloud is nice since they periodically add newer type families from a wide variety of type foundries.

In the way-back world...I did (and somewhere around here) still do have font families purchased from Adobe, as I recall. They are on the 3.5" diskette. I'd say that I have probably 10 or more and the ones I continue to use have migrated on every computer since...e.g. Helvetica, Tekton...etc. New Century Schoolbook is such a font that I have used for my go-to Serif font but I have not been so good at migrating to new computers. Also, back in the day, I had a program called "Font Hopper" that would migrate those Post Script fonts into other formats supported by Windows and such...again, we are going back a ways.

I still have some of my oldest software boxes (Photoshop 2.5, Illustrator 4, CorelDRAW 3, etc) including the install discs. Fractal Design's Painter was packaged in a paint can in its earliest few versions. The box for Adobe Illustrator 4 had a plastic binder containing a bunch of 3.5" floppy discs, four or so of the discs contained the application installer and the rest were a collection of about 200 Postscript Type 1 fonts. Typefaces like Akzidenz Grotesk consumed a good bit of that 200 font count.

Back in the early 1990's I also bought a few typefaces that were just one or two fonts on a 3.5" floppy. Letraset sold a couple or so dozen "Fontek" fonts in that manner. When DTS was introduced I bought a copy of Letraset Dolmen on a floppy to have the font they used to create the "dts" letters. I might still have the actual disc.

One sad thing: back in January Adobe announced they would discontinue support for Postscript Type 1 fonts in all of their applications by January 2023. Type 1 font support is being removed from Photoshop CC this year, but that announcement was made in 2019. This doesn't affect Postscript itself. Existing EPS or PDF files with embedded T1 fonts can still be placed into applications like InDesign, Illustrator and FrameMaker, as well as be exported to PDF.

Nevertheless, for content creation users will have to make conversions of their old Type 1 fonts to continue using them. There are several web sites that do font conversions. To get the best results (and do batch conversions) applications like TransType by FontLab will be a better choice.

I think my favourite font for use in web design is Google's Roboto. It just looks very pleasing to me, and is licensed under the Apache 2.0 so can be freely used.

Roboto is the primary system typeface for Android. It's a clean looking typeface and has a decent character set. According to Font Squirrel the most popular free/open source typeface is currently Montserrat. I see Lato used quite a bit (Lato doesn't work for all purposes), so I'm starting to get annoyed by that one.

It's funny to think that a few decades ago, a major decider of what printer to buy was what fonts it supported. I have the font brochure that can with a 1985 Apple LaserWriter (first printer with PostScript) that describes the dozen or so built in fonts. And then more than half of the printer's owners manual is actually advice on how to typeset documents, when to use which fonts, how diagrams can be used, etc. It's facinating looking back on that now, and probably still quite relevant and useful actually!

Lots of computers users today couldn't even fathom resident fonts inside a laser printer. It was a big thing back in the 1980's. I can remember writing documents in the MS-DOS version of Word Perfect on a monochrome screen and not knowing how things were going to look until the document came out of the printer.

Today computers have so much more processing power, storage capacity and graphics capability that it's not necessary to download font into a printer. You can embed font data into PDFs and even some other application file types.

Here are two fonts I used for my company logos some years back... TrueType's "Chainlink" and "Metalcut". I really liked the somewhat industrial, and pardon the pun, "heavy metal" look of the fonts, and they seemed to work well together. I may still have the 3.5 disc for them somewhere, along with a variety of other fonts on that set.

If your copy of "Chainlink" is the one I remember it was a knock-off of VGC Serpentine, or what I call "the Lethal Weapon font." Linotype has the rights to Serpentine now. It was first designed by Dick Jensen in 1972. The Chainlink font I had came on a floppy disc that required an installer for the fonts to work. Corel made that issue a moot point point by licensing Serpentine as one of the fonts bundled in CorelDRAW in the mid 1990's.

[Gordon McLeod]

Microgamma Bold Extended

[Steve Guttag]

Maybe I'll go back and start using "Chicago" as my preferred font. I probably have it somewhere as a bitmap!

[Marcel Birgelen]

Chicago, as in the pixel-optimized MacOS version of it, is a pretty iconic font ant it just screams MacOS. I never understood why they needed to replace it with that generic "Charcoal" or"Lucida Grande" as has been used in most MacOS X releases up until recently, when they switched to Helvetica Neue.

I'd say the IBM PC CP437 font set, the default 80x25 console font set for the original IBM PC was also a pretty iconic looking font set, forever tied to the classic DOS CRT-screen look.

Buying and/or licensing fonts can be its own rabbit hole too. We buy new type families on occasion to keep things "fresh." It's a hazard to rely on something like a font bundle in CorelDRAW. Even though that collection has around 1000 fonts it is rarely updated and it getting pretty stale. The Adobe Fonts service in Creative Cloud is nice since they periodically add newer type families from a wide variety of type foundries.

I've never really checked the licenses of those cloud font libraries, but what happens with the license if you cancel your subscription? I guess it's clear that you're not allowed to use them for any substantial new creations anymore, but what actually happens with the stuff you used one of those fonts for? I know that a lot of people had to retrospectively pull some YouTube videos, because they used a commercial music service for some background music and lice, but after cancelling the subscription, those licenses expired with it.

[Bobby Henderson]

Chicago, as in the pixel-optimized MacOS version of it, is a pretty iconic font ant it just screams MacOS. I never understood why they needed to replace it with that generic "Charcoal" or"Lucida Grande" as has been used in most MacOS X releases up until recently, when they switched to Helvetica Neue.

The Chicago pixel typeface was identifiable with the original "classic" MacOS. There are multiple reasons why Apple moved past it. First, the look of the typeface is dated in 1980's low-rez video game chic. Chicago was designed for computers with low resolution monitors and limited color display. Lots of advances happened from the late 1980's thru the 1990's, including the ability to use anti-aliased type on screen via vector-based fonts. By the time OSX arrived it was no longer necessary to use crude looking pixel typefaces as system fonts.

By the way, even though a few weights of Helvetica and Helvetica Neue are bundled in OSX and iPad OS the actual system typeface for both is a different typeface: San Francisco. It looks a lot like Helvetica but there are noticeable differences.

I've never really checked the licenses of those cloud font libraries, but what happens with the license if you cancel your subscription? I guess it's clear that you're not allowed to use them for any substantial new creations anymore, but what actually happens with the stuff you used one of those fonts for?

The Adobe Fonts service requires an always-on Internet connection in order for a subscriber to use fonts activated to his account. The font files aren't resident on the hard disc in a way where the user can access or copy them. Fonts are easy to activate and deactivate thru either the CC user panel or the Adobe Fonts web site. Active fonts will show up on any computer signed into the account, plus they'll show up on a device such as an iPad.

If a user cancels his CC subscription any fonts used via Adobe Fonts will disappear. However, font data can be embedded into PDFs and stay there regardless of CC account status. Of course another practice I often use is converting type objects to outlines when I'm finished with a design.

Unless I'm dealing with paragraphs of body copy or large amounts of single line text strings I want to edit later I'm going to convert the font data into raw vector shapes. There are multiple reasons to do this. If you leave font data active in something like a logo design there is no telling how that file will open years later, perhaps on a different computer system. You have to use the exact same font files used to create the original artwork and depend on the host application to treat the font data exactly as it did back when the original file was created. It's just easier to convert the lettering to outlines. That way you don't have to go hunting for font files to install.

Another reason to convert type objects to outlines in regards to Adobe Fonts: sometimes type foundries pull fonts from the Adobe Fonts service. It doesn't happen very often, certainly not like Netflix removing lots of shows at the end of a month. But it does happen. The biggest removal came from Font Bureau when they pulled a couple or so dozen type families from the service. One funny upshot to the story: a number of type families Font Bureau pulled later returned to Adobe Fonts via the typeface designers. One example is the Interstate family by Tobias Frere-Jones (the same guy who designed Gotham).

[Harold Hallikainen]

Speaking of bitmap fonts, I used UniFont ( http://unifoundry.com/index.html ) in several USL products such as the JSD-100, JSD-60, CCR-100, CCH-100. It allows the closed captioning system to display Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and other languages as long as the text is left to right. Characters are either 8 or 16 pixels wide and 16 pixels high.

Harold

[Marcel Birgelen]

Did you use a display controller that could load that font or did you have a display that exposed itself as bitmap buffer and did you need to render the glyphs yourself?

The Chicago pixel typeface was identifiable with the original "classic" MacOS. There are multiple reasons why Apple moved past it. First, the look of the typeface is dated in 1980's low-rez video game chic. Chicago was designed for computers with low resolution monitors and limited color display. Lots of advances happened from the late 1980's thru the 1990's, including the ability to use anti-aliased type on screen via vector-based fonts. By the time OSX arrived it was no longer necessary to use crude looking pixel typefaces as system fonts.

For me, the font really represented "the Mac" and I don't really get the 80s vibe like with many other bitmap fonts from the time, even though the font uses a lot of double-pixel straight lines, to increase readability on early CRT screens. They later revived it for the iPod, which had high-contrast LCD displays, later models even had RGB screens.

If a user cancels his CC subscription any fonts used via Adobe Fonts will disappear. However, font data can be embedded into PDFs and stay there regardless of CC account status. Of course another practice I often use is converting type objects to outlines when I'm finished with a design.

Being a long-time Adobe CC subscriber myself, I'm aware that their fonts aren't installed like normal system fonts and will be rendered inaccessible after you remove or terminate the subscription. My question was more regarding the legal implications of terminating a subscription, which includes the usage rights for those fonts.

See, before this whole software subscription thing came along, the only way to license fonts that needed an extra license was to buy them from either the creator or a type foundry (individually or as part of a pack, that doesn't really matter). This would also secure the usage rights for the further distribution of the works that contain said fonts. So, what happens if I terminate my Adobe CC subscription? Do I still have the right to distribute the stuff that uses this font? While converting a font to outlines removes the dependency to the font itself, it doesn't remove any legal obligations.

The answer will probably be buried somewhere deep in Adobe's EULA, but I haven't really bothered to look yet. Still, the implications of this could be another potential "rats nest".

[Bobby Henderson]

For me, the font really represented "the Mac" and I don't really get the 80s vibe like with many other bitmap fonts from the time, even though the font uses a lot of double-pixel straight lines, to increase readability on early CRT screens. They later revived it for the iPod, which had high-contrast LCD displays, later models even had RGB screens.

To me the Chicago typeface still falls into the 1980s sensibility of what "high tech" was. Even back then the look was slightly cheesy. There's a lot of old 1970's and 1980's future-tech inspired typefaces, such as Stop or Data 70. They have a certain charm to them. But I can't see anyone setting the titles for a 2020's science fiction movie in those typefaces.

Computers are no longer futuristic gadgets or appliances like they were 40 years ago. Today a personal computer, notebook, tablet or even a mobile phone is merely a contemporary electronic tool. Neutral looking typefaces go better with a clean user interface.

See, before this whole software subscription thing came along, the only way to license fonts that needed an extra license was to buy them from either the creator or a type foundry (individually or as part of a pack, that doesn't really matter). This would also secure the usage rights for the further distribution of the works that contain said fonts. So, what happens if I terminate my Adobe CC subscription? Do I still have the right to distribute the stuff that uses this font? While converting a font to outlines removes the dependency to the font itself, it doesn't remove any legal obligations.

Generally speaking, once you convert a typographical object based on a font file into raw vector outlines, such as the lettering in a logo, there is no more legal obligation. You can't copyright the shape of a letter. For decades type designers could only copyright and trademark the name of the typeface, not the glyph designs. That is what provided the opening for various clones of typefaces such as Helvetica.

With digital fonts, the actual font data can be copyrighted. But if you convert a type object to outlines it is no longer editable lettering. It's just geometric vector shapes that look like letters. No font files are required to be installed to open the design in a graphics application like Illustrator.

[Frank Cox]

I used to use Print Shop and Print Master to make signs using a dot matrix printer, first with my Commodore 64 and then with my DOS computer. In fact, I still have and use one of those signs -- I have one that says "I'm in the projection room -- Be right back!" mounted on a cardboard stand that I made out of a chocolate bar box years ago. I still use it occasionally if I have to go somewhere for a moment while the show is on and nobody is around.

One of my I'll get around it someday projects is to write a translator for MPS-801 graphic output to a "modern" graphic format so graphic programs like these can be useful once again. The Commdore 64 emulator called Vice can output a "print.dump" file and someone wrote a postscript converter for the text output (https://www.pdbuchan.com/commodore/vicetops.html) but it doesn't do graphics. It shouldn't be too hard to read print.dump and populate a pixel grid. Someday...

[Kenneth Wuepper]

I really learned to like CopperPlate Gothic. This font is legible in the very tiniest of point sizes. Designed for use in charting and columnar forms, this font stays pretty clearly readable.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Generally speaking, once you convert a typographical object based on a font file into raw vector outlines, such as the lettering in a logo, there is no more legal obligation. You can't copyright the shape of a letter. For decades type designers could only copyright and trademark the name of the typeface, not the glyph designs. That is what provided the opening for various clones of typefaces such as Helvetica.

With digital fonts, the actual font data can be copyrighted. But if you convert a type object to outlines it is no longer editable lettering. It's just geometric vector shapes that look like letters. No font files are required to be installed to open the design in a graphics application like Illustrator.

Well, it ain't all that simple... after all, it's copyright and everything that copyright touches makes it inherently complex...

While in the US, a typeface in itself, can't be copyrighted, this isn't true in Europe, where most countries do actually honor copyright on typeface designs. A computer font can be considered a sort of program (in the end, it tells the computer, printer or digital printing press what to do) and as such, there is no dispute about copyright being applicable here. While it's clear, in the U.S., that a bitmap rendering of a typeface doesn't fall under copyright, there seem to be different interpretations for vector representations of those typefaces, as those vectors do retain a substantial part of the original font and such a substantial part of an original work that falls under copyright...

[Bobby Henderson]

For lettering in graphical items like logos the situation is that simple. Once the letters are converted to outlines the actual font data is erased. The letters are just raw shapes.

A logo design can be copyrighted and even trademarked. But the guy who designed the typeface can't simply go waltzing up to the graphic artist with his hand out demanding another pay day. With as many typeface knock-offs that exist the typeface designer would have a tough time proving his font file and not that of someone else was used to create the logo. Hell, I've hand drawn lettering that looked like a typeface I didn't own, scanned it and vectorized it. There would be hell to pay if I had to pay a certain type designer a penalty fee when I didn't use his font files at all.

From a business standpoint it would be flagrantly stupid for a typeface designer to go around suing graphics people for more money after they already paid for the freaking font files. That would create some bad word of mouth that would negatively affect the type designer's font sales.

Just from a third party standpoint legal turmoil can have a chilling effect on a foundry's sales. Tobias Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler had a fairly public falling out and legal battle with Hoefler ending up looking like quite a bad guy as the HFJ type foundry was split up. It's another reason why I don't use Gotham very much anymore in my design work. It was Tobias Frere-Jones' creation yet Hoefler is getting all the money for it. So why give that typeface any more exposure when Frere-Jones wasn't getting any benefit from it?

The use cases where people have to be careful with font rights is when they want to embed a particular typeface's font data into something that is mass produced, such as a magazine, book or anything else where many thousands or even millions of copies of the product are sold. On those platforms typeface designers are occasionally commissioned to develop custom typefaces for a mass publication. The Gotham typeface started out as an in-house set of fonts for GQ Magazine.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Did you use a display controller that could load that font or did you have a display that exposed itself as bitmap buffer and did you need to render the glyphs yourself?

I wrote a perl program that converts the Unifont hex to Intel hex to drive an EPROM programmer, then programmed a 2 MB SPI flash chip. I wrote microcontroller code to draw the characters on the display, pixel by pixel. I wrote code to take a UTF-8 string, break it into 16 bit Unicode code points, then pull the bitmaps from the external flash and draw the them on the display. As mentioned before, the characters can be either 8 or 16 pixels wide. The code keeps track of where the next character goes, deals with CR and LF, etc. There is also integer scaling (like for the fader level or format name on the JSD-60 and JSD-100, which is large text).

Most of the code was in C. But in the case of the JSD-60, CCR-100, and CCH-100, the microcontroller driving the display was pretty low speed (Microchip PIC18), so the code that drove the display SPI interface was in assembly to speed it up. The display documentation seems to always be terrible, so a lot of experimenting was required to get it running. In general, you set a cursor position, then start sending RGB levels for the pixels in a row. Then move to another position, and send more pixel values. Most of the display controllers I used took care of display refresh. I just had to set pixels over SPI. If I did not send anything for a while, the display stayed the same. The CCH-100, however, has a pretty complex video input. For that, I set up a RAM video buffer in the PIC18 chip. The rendering code wrote to that buffer. An interrupt service routine read from that buffer and sent the pixels out continuously over SPI. GPIO pins drove the horizontal and vertical sync pins.

Lots of fun!

Harold

[Marcel Birgelen]

I guess it must have been in the early 90s when I've last done something like manual font rendering, but in that case it was for an industrial application and the platform was an IBM PC in VGA mode 12h... Most of the program was in Pascal (which was THE thing then), but I ended up writing those routines in assembly, because that was the only thing fast enough to do so. But thank god for bit-blit operations on those platforms...

As for SPI interfaces and displays... Until now, I've only worked with simple, character driven embedded displays. As for pixel mapped displays via SPI, I've only looked at them, but I know from some friends that they're always "fun". None of those Chinese manufacturers seems to be doing a good job ad documenting them and there doesn't seem to be a universal standard as how to drive them. The same seems to apply to other interfaces like LVDS too. Apparently, there is something new, called MIPI, which has been developed among mobile phone and "IoT" manufacturers for the more high-end embedded displays, which adheres to standards and for which there seem to be "drivers"...

For lettering in graphical items like logos the situation is that simple. Once the letters are converted to outlines the actual font data is erased. The letters are just raw shapes.

A logo design can be copyrighted and even trademarked. But the guy who designed the typeface can't simply go waltzing up to the graphic artist with his hand out demanding another pay day. With as many typeface knock-offs that exist the typeface designer would have a tough time proving his font file and not that of someone else was used to create the logo. Hell, I've hand drawn lettering that looked like a typeface I didn't own, scanned it and vectorized it. There would be hell to pay if I had to pay a certain type designer a penalty fee when I didn't use his font files at all.

From a business standpoint it would be flagrantly stupid for a typeface designer to go around suing graphics people for more money after they already paid for the freaking font files. That would create some bad word of mouth that would negatively affect the type designer's font sales.

Just from a third party standpoint legal turmoil can have a chilling effect on a foundry's sales. Tobias Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler had a fairly public falling out and legal battle with Hoefler ending up looking like quite a bad guy as the HFJ type foundry was split up. It's another reason why I don't use Gotham very much anymore in my design work. It was Tobias Frere-Jones' creation yet Hoefler is getting all the money for it. So why give that typeface any more exposure when Frere-Jones wasn't getting any benefit from it?

The use cases where people have to be careful with font rights is when they want to embed a particular typeface's font data into something that is mass produced, such as a magazine, book or anything else where many thousands or even millions of copies of the product are sold. On those platforms typeface designers are occasionally commissioned to develop custom typefaces for a mass publication. The Gotham typeface started out as an in-house set of fonts for GQ Magazine.

People and as a direct result also corporations are greedy bastards... or at least, there are a sufficient number out there who most definitely are. They don't often do what's best for them in the long run, they just care about the dollars... or euros. There are plenty of entities actively scanning the Internet in order to find so called "copyrighted material", stuff like photos, music and clip-art that has been used for some image or YouTube video on-line. Many of them immediately send-out settlement notices for whatever random sum. Much of it is being automated, just like that YouTube algorithm that mutes your sound once it detects some music playing in the background that's in their fingerprint database.

While I've not yet heard about disputes about typefaces for something like a single poster or a single printed work in any form, there have been legal issues around typefaces around here regarding stuff like logos. Typefaces are, in most European countries being considered an original work. Since a lot of stuff nowadays is international and especially if you target European countries, I think you should check the license agreement of your fonts as what your rights are when you do use it in an original work, like a logo.

That's also where the risk of subscription based licenses is. What happens with that right of using those fonts in original works once you quit your subscription license? And is it even possible to grant such rights on a "per subscription" base? I'm not a lawyer, but I do think it's an interesting question for everybody who works with fonts as part of their job. And while the issue isn't as pressing in the U.S., where the law clearly states that typefaces aren't, in itself, protected by copyright, there are plenty of jurisdictions around the world, that do accept typefaces as being protected by copyright. The Berne Convention doesn't explicitly state typefaces, so it's up to the individual countries in that agreement to implement their own view on it.