Your favourite font choices

[Bobby Henderson]

I don't see individual characters when I read. I see groups of letters and form them into words. Most people read in groups of letters or make word parts into symbols but that is even more important for me because I get letters mixed up more easily than others do.

Everyone reads words as whole units instead of letter by letter. Nevertheless the fact remains that the negative spaces in and around letters are every bit as important as the letters themselves. When lettering has to be viewed from a far distance or at tiny point sizes on a printed page the spacing must be loosened to preserve legibility.

I need to see letters in predictable groups so that I can form them into words, easier.

W i t h l e t t e r s t o o f a r a p a r t , i t i s h a r d e r t o r e a d.

That illustrative example is not valid at all. You left out the word spaces. When the default letter spacing of a typeface is made more loose, as it is in highway sign typefaces, the default word spacing is proportionately much wider as well.

I don't like the bent bottoms of the lower case "L" in Clearview because I can confuse them with lower case letter "J." Slanted tops of the strokes do a better job of differentiating "I" from "l" for me.

The curved terminal at the bottom of the lowercase "l" in Clearview Highway is partly a stylistic choice and partly a judgment call to improve character legibility. Words like "Illinois" are harder to read in Series Gothic than they are in Clearview Highway. The slanted tops of the lowercase "l" letters are legibile at only a limited distance. The "foot" on a Clearview "l" makes the letter legible at farther viewing distances.

Plenty of modern typefaces, ones with vastly larger character sets than both Highway Gothic or Clearview, will often contain one or more alternate glyphs for letters such as a lowercase "l." Helvetica Now is one such example.

To me it does look like a discount version of Verdana and there is nothing you can do about that.

Thankfully your lack of attention to detail and amateur judgment on the typeface has zero influence over anyone else using it. There is nothing you can do about that either.

Funny, I didn't mention anything particular about the history of Arial, I never mentioned that Microsoft created it. And... I also didn't call it a clone, but a "discount version of", which it essentially is...

You didn't call Arial a "discount version of" or anything like that. You wrote:
"You and I both know, the name falls under trademark law, not copyright. Trademaks can be renewed ad infinitum, as long as they're still being used. That's why URW called their "Helvetica" Nimbus Sans and Microsoft calls it Arial. URW learned about trademark law the hard way..."

URW did create Nimbus Sans and it is a clone of Helvetica. You included Microsoft and Arial in the same context, implying Arial is a clone of Helvetica and that Microsoft created it.

[Marcel Birgelen]

That illustrative example is not valid at all. You left out the word spaces. When the default letter spacing of a typeface is made more loose, as it is in highway sign typefaces, the default word spacing is proportionately much wider as well.

I guess the point was to illustrate how badly spaced fonts can ruin the perceived spacing between words and thus create the illusion of a string of characters, rather than individual words.

Thankfully your lack of attention to detail and amateur judgment on the typeface has zero influence over anyone else using it. There is nothing you can do about that either.

Your lack of judgement about me won't change anything either, but if it feels better to try to denigrate other people to establish some feeling of superiority, be my guest, I'm not really particularly bothered by it. Personally, I'd prefer to continue on a basis without those personal attacks, like grown-ups are supposed to do, but maybe I expected a bit too much.

But in the end, all "typographic experts" won't change anything about the fact that some agonizing font like Comic Sans will keep cropping up EVERYWHERE. Not everybody is born with the perfect stylistic feel for fonts. They just select the font they like from the drop-down menu and call it a day.

In the end, fonts may not be that important for most people at all... IKEA has been using Verdana from 2009 to 2019 for EVERYTHING. It made some typographer's head explode, but it didn't hurt their bottom line in any way. Even Disney manages to churn out packaging material with Comic Sans on it in 2021...

You didn't call Arial a "discount version of" or anything like that. You wrote:
"You and I both know, the name falls under trademark law, not copyright. Trademaks can be renewed ad infinitum, as long as they're still being used. That's why URW called their "Helvetica" Nimbus Sans and Microsoft calls it Arial. URW learned about trademark law the hard way..."

URW did create Nimbus Sans and it is a clone of Helvetica. You included Microsoft and Arial in the same context, implying Arial is a clone of Helvetica and that Microsoft created it.

You see what I mean? You're just looking for stuff to piss on. Nothing here states that Microsoft is the original creator of Arial. Nothing here gives any clue about the history of Arial. I've never even touched that subject before my last post. And Arial has literally been marketed as a cheap alternative for Helvetica, it literally cloned all aspects of the fonts, except the typeface itself. It's intended as a drop-in replacement for Helvetica. I don't know if that qualifies as a "clone", but I never used the word clone, you came up with that yourself.

And just for the record, I literally wrote: I generally hate the Microsoft standard fonts, this includes Arial, which is a discount version of Helvetica., it's there, you can look it up.

[Randy Stankey]

You left out the word spaces.

No, I didn’t. I typed the spaces but the forum software crunched them.
I didn’t complain and let it stand because, even though it wasn’t what I intended, it still got my point across.

[Bobby Henderson]

Your lack of judgement about me won't change anything either, but if it feels better to try to denigrate other people to establish some feeling of superiority, be my guest, I'm not really particularly bothered by it.

Yet here you are, trying for multiple pages of this thread to "school me" on type, despite your comparative lack of qualifications to do so. If you truthfully don't care about the topic then it just further proves my earlier complaint that you're only here in this thread to troll for an argument with me.

In the end, fonts may not be that important for most people at all... IKEA has been using Verdana from 2009 to 2019 for EVERYTHING. It made some typographer's head explode, but it didn't hurt their bottom line in any way. Even Disney manages to churn out packaging material with Comic Sans on it in 2021...

I can't recall Verdana generating lots of complaints in graphic design circles, certainly not on the order of Arial or Comic Sans. Verdana has been a go-to default typeface in many web page style sheets over the years. As web browsers for various devices have improved in recent years more web sites have moved over to embedding their own web fonts of choice rather than relying on defaults found in desktop computers.

I don't love Verdana, but I don't hate it either. The standard version bundled in Windows, OSX and iPad OS has only four basic weights. If I was a huge fan of the typeface I could spend $300 on Verdana Pro, which has 20 font files, 10 of which are condensed versions. I'm just not that much of a Verdana fan.

You see what I mean? You're just looking for stuff to piss on. Nothing here states that Microsoft is the original creator of Arial. Nothing here gives any clue about the history of Arial. I've never even touched that subject before my last post. And Arial has literally been marketed as a cheap alternative for Helvetica, it literally cloned all aspects of the fonts, except the typeface itself. It's intended as a drop-in replacement for Helvetica. I don't know if that qualifies as a "clone", but I never used the word clone, you came up with that yourself.

The context of the conversation at that time was clone typefaces and how they're perfectly legal to create. You dropped the Microsoft and Arial thing into that.

Arial is visually very different from Helvetica. It looks less like Helvetica than typefaces such as Akzidenz Grotesk or Franklin Gothic (and those don't look identical to Helvetica either). As for the identical metrics, that only works to a limited extent on old fonts based on the original 1950's version of Helvetica, and only for the basic weights of that version that Arial covers. The original Helvetica has more styles than Arial. Arial doesn't work as a geometric replacement for Helvetica Neue, and it doesn't have anywhere near as many styles as Helvetica Neue. The same goes for Helvetica Now.

I routinely crap on Arial because it is bad for multiple reasons. Stylistically the typeface is a Frankstein's-monster hodge-podge of other typefaces. Many of the letter forms are harsh looking for their lack of grace. There's lots of oddly crooked bends in curved letters. Some of the angled cuts don't make any visual sense. It's just a bunch of random crap. It's something of a miracle the overall thing has a recognizable style to it, and that's using the term "style" loosely. The only positive thing I can say about Arial is the current version in Windows 10 has a very large character set.

Even though Arial is ugly it is ubiquitous, even more so than Helvetica. You have to own a Mac or iPad to get free, legal access to some weights of Helvetica and Helvetica Neue as system fonts. I associate Arial with rancid-quality sign designs. Hacks who don't know what the hell they're doing (or don't care) routinely grab Arial and use it on all kinds of projects. Because Arial starts with "A" it's near the top of the font menu. For some applications (such as CorelDRAW) Arial is the default typeface unless the user bothers to change it. The hacks stretch and squeeze Arial out of its normal proportions to fit any space. They do that rather than scroll down for a more appropriate typeface that has more weights and widths in its font files. It's sheer laziness. The scourge of badly designed signs is causing a growing number of city governments to enact severely restrictive sign ordinances. That's a threat to my business. So I take the problem pretty seriously.

[Frank Cox]

Hey, Bobby, I would be interested in your opinion of the overpass font, which is based on highway gothic.

Red Hat uses it as their corporate font. I've never really known what to think of it because of its lineage as a font for highway signs.

Does that make it a font that's suitable for something like a sign in a window "Sale today!" or "Open from 9-5"? For a letter that you're sending to your aged grandmother with poor eyesight? For.. what, exactly?

I obviously don't know much (or anything) about fonts and their artistic value and whatnot, but the lineage of overpass and its supposed super-duper legibility makes it interesting. (Is it really all that super-duper and legible?)

[Marcel Birgelen]

Yet here you are, trying for multiple pages of this thread to "school me" on type, despite your comparative lack of qualifications to do so. If you truthfully don't care about the topic then it just further proves my earlier complaint that you're only here in this thread to troll for an argument with me.

I'm not schooling you on type. The discussion hasn't been about type, but about certain legal aspects. I've never claimed to be an experts on type, but I happen to know a bit more about the topic than Joe Average... I actually did a course on it, with certificate... I have programmed software that renders fonts to framebuffers and while I didn't build the font renderer myself, I got more involved in font-internals than I liked to, when that renderer did stuff that wasn't entirely expected...

I can't recall Verdana generating lots of complaints in graphic design circles, certainly not on the order of Arial or Comic Sans. Verdana has been a go-to default typeface in many web page style sheets over the years. As web browsers for various devices have improved in recent years more web sites have moved over to embedding their own web fonts of choice rather than relying on defaults found in desktop computers.

I don't love Verdana, but I don't hate it either. The standard version bundled in Windows, OSX and iPad OS has only four basic weights. If I was a huge fan of the typeface I could spend $300 on Verdana Pro, which has 20 font files, 10 of which are condensed versions. I'm just not that much of a Verdana fan.

Part of the hate is because it's just another one of those MS standard fonts. Verdana was actually developped specificially for Microsoft. I remember many people hating the usage of it on websites, because it started as a Microsoft-only thing and websites using Verdana would just not render as intended on any computer without Verdana. It was part of that thing back in the late 90s where Microsoft tried to assimilate the web, by introducing MS-only technologies to it. In realty, many websites probably looked better in Verdana than any other default font. Nowadays, websites can dynamically load fonts and there are metrically compatible alternatives to Verdana with open licenses, like DejaVu Sans.

Verdana was specifically designed to be readable on low-resolution displays, it was never intended to look beautiful. What bothers me most is that some letters and numbers do have serifs, while it 's otherwise a "sans serif" font.

Verdana or rather IKEA did cause quite a stir when they switched all their corporate communication from their custom version of Futura to Verdana in 2009. Many "type-heads" didn't understand why they would trade-in a font perceived to be much more dedicated, like Futura to something perceived as much more bland and generic like Verdana. I noticed this at first in late 2008. Apparently, "my" go-to store was either early with the switch or maybe it was used as a testing ground. I thought, back then, that it was just a fluke. The reason why they switched to Verdana was because their version of Futura wasn't ready for many of their international operations and they needed to revert to other fonts for those markets. In 2020 they decided to switch to Noto, a switch which caused far less waves.

Arial is visually very different from Helvetica. It looks less like Helvetica than typefaces such as Akzidenz Grotesk or Franklin Gothic (and those don't look identical to Helvetica either). As for the identical metrics, that only works to a limited extent on old fonts based on the original 1950's version of Helvetica, and only for the basic weights of that version that Arial covers. The original Helvetica has more styles than Arial. Arial doesn't work as a geometric replacement for Helvetica Neue, and it doesn't have anywhere near as many styles as Helvetica Neue. The same goes for Helvetica Now.

AFAIK it works with "Helvetica" and with "Helvetica Narrow" and their variations of Bold, Oblique and Bold Oblique. (Arial calls their version of Oblique Italic, I don't know if it's a real Italic font or just a way of distinguishing themselves.)

I routinely crap on Arial because it is bad for multiple reasons. Stylistically the typeface is a Frankstein's-monster hodge-podge of other typefaces. Many of the letter forms are harsh looking for their lack of grace. There's lots of oddly crooked bends in curved letters. Some of the angled cuts don't make any visual sense. It's just a bunch of random crap. It's something of a miracle the overall thing has a recognizable style to it, and that's using the term "style" loosely. The only positive thing I can say about Arial is the current version in Windows 10 has a very large character set.

I've never liked Arial. I hate its use in papers, as I think it's not the most readable font. Actually, I prefer stuff with some serifs if it goes on over multiple pages. I also don't like it as a display font, it doesn't render well on low-resolutions either.

Metrically compatible fonts, which intentionally drastically change the look typeface will probably never look good. You have to give up a lot of freedom in designing your font and you need to implement all kinds of hacks to make it fit together. It's a bit like trying to cram a new building into a small, existing plot. Steve Jobs blamed Microsoft to have no taste and I guess he did have a point. It took Microsoft many years to take fonts somewhat seriously, it wasn't until Windows 3.1 in 1992 that Microsoft introduced TrueType fonts, which ironically became the most used fonts on earth. Before that, the best we had were dynamically spaced bitmap fonts.

Even though Arial is ugly it is ubiquitous, even more so than Helvetica. You have to own a Mac or iPad to get free, legal access to some weights of Helvetica and Helvetica Neue as system fonts. I associate Arial with rancid-quality sign designs. Hacks who don't know what the hell they're doing (or don't care) routinely grab Arial and use it on all kinds of projects. Because Arial starts with "A" it's near the top of the font menu. For some applications (such as CorelDRAW) Arial is the default typeface unless the user bothers to change it. The hacks stretch and squeeze Arial out of its normal proportions to fit any space. They do that rather than scroll down for a more appropriate typeface that has more weights and widths in its font files. It's sheer laziness. The scourge of badly designed signs is causing a growing number of city governments to enact severely restrictive sign ordinances. That's a threat to my business. So I take the problem pretty seriously.

My parents used to live in a pretty high-class apartment complex that had its fancy name written in Comic Sans in rather large letters on the front of the building. I tried to point out the irony in this, but nobody understood me.

Like I said, even Disney, or in this case, a company paying billions of dollars to run under Disney's license manages to churn out packaging with both the Disney logo and Comic Sans on it (you can't see the Disney or Tokyo Disney Resort logo on this image, but it's there):

maxresdefault.jpg

It's on ALL their packages, including wrappers, drinks, cartons, even some napkins... This wasn't an employee printing some haphazard sign on their computer, they literally ordered millions of those packages. Maybe we can excuse them, because they're Japanese.

But type is a hard subject to sell, because a lot of people just don't see it the way you do. If you tell a company they need to pay a license for their custom font they're using on all their communication, you'll see how quickly they start to revert using Arial or Times New Roman instead, at least that's my experience...

Does that make it a font that's suitable for something like a sign in a window "Sale today!" or "Open from 9-5"? For a letter that you're sending to your aged grandmother with poor eyesight? For.. what, exactly?

You should be careful at aiming at old people with those kind of tricks. Before you know, they mistake your sign for the exit they had to take and you'll end up with some grandmother's car in your lobby. :P

[Van Dalton]

There's no shortage of fonts around these days, but I see that Microsoft is releasing five new fonts and as a publicity stunt of some kind they're taking votes(?) for which one people think should be their new default font.

Here's one of the articles describing this https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/micr...-default-font/

I vote for System. Maybe MS Sans Serif as an alternative.

That illustrative example is not valid at all. You left out the word spaces.

I think it's an artefact of the way browsers (and possibly this BBS software) render HTML text. Most I've used parse multiple spaces as a single one. Why, I don't know. They were doing that back when NCSA Mosaic was the latest thing.

T h i s s e n t e n c e h a s t h r e e s p a c e s b e t w e e n w o r d s .

It's really a pain in the ass when posting source code that relies on spacing and indentation and the browser or BBS automatically left-aligns everything and there's no way to override it.

[Frank Cox]

I don't think that's anything specific to the software. By default, standard html collapses multiple spaces.

[Bobby Henderson]

Hey, Bobby, I would be interested in your opinion of the overpass font, which is based on highway gothic.

Overpass is similar in some respects to Tobias Frere-Jones' Interstate type family. There are a lot of subtle differences between the two typefaces. Interstate is a more faithful looking re-creation of FHWA Series Gothic, although it is vastly more cleaned up. The various versions of "Highway Gothic" in use for highway signs all have lots of ugly quirks. Interstate improved on the letters a great deal while preserving much of the "visual DNA." Interstate has more weights than Overpass. Interstate and also has a full range compressed, condensed and regular widths.

Overpass is a good quality typeface, and it is available for free via Google Fonts. Interstate is commercially sold, but can be synced via the Adobe Fonts service.

Just like Interstate, Overpass is not meant for highway sign use. Its spacing is geared for print documents or on-screen use. It wouldn't be bad for commercial sign use on businesses, or as a typeface on a way-finding sign system. For highway/traffic sign use Overpass would need wider letter and word spacing. And it would need a range of condensed to extended weights to cover the B, C, D, E, E/M and F widths of Highway Gothic (or the 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 widths of Clearview Highway). A variable version of Overpass with weight, width and optical size axes could cover all those bases. But it is a great deal of work to build such a thing.

I'm not schooling you on type. The discussion hasn't been about type, but about certain legal aspects.

The discussion was originally about type, not the legal aspects of it. You have been over-blowing the legal crap since page 2, starting with second guessing me about the use of the Adobe Fonts service (specifically about converting type to raw vector outlines) and going on and on from there.

I've never liked Arial. I hate its use in papers, as I think it's not the most readable font. Actually, I prefer stuff with some serifs if it goes on over multiple pages. I also don't like it as a display font, it doesn't render well on low-resolutions either.

For body copy it's generally better to use serif typefaces that are designed specifically for large passages of text. As I said earlier, my hatred of Arial is rooted in its very common appearance in poorly designed signs. I don't know why so many sign people use it when they all have access to far better alternatives. Not just in terms of appearance either. Arial has a very limited number of weights compared to other "work horse" sans serif typefaces. It has no compressed, condensed or extended weights, unlike Helvetica and numerous other sans typefaces. So the "designers" take Arial and distort it. Arial is already ugly just in its natural state. It gets even more visually horrid when it is artificially squeezed or stretched.

Metrically compatible fonts, which intentionally drastically change the look typeface will probably never look good. You have to give up a lot of freedom in designing your font and you need to implement all kinds of hacks to make it fit together. It's a bit like trying to cram a new building into a small, existing plot. Steve Jobs blamed Microsoft to have no taste and I guess he did have a point. It took Microsoft many years to take fonts somewhat seriously, it wasn't until Windows 3.1 in 1992 that Microsoft introduced TrueType fonts, which ironically became the most used fonts on earth. Before that, the best we had were dynamically spaced bitmap fonts.

Arial tries to fit the square peg into the round hole and looks pretty ugly while trying to do it.

Microsoft and Apple essentially created TrueType to remove leverage Adobe had with type technology. The Postscript Type 1 format preceded TrueType, first appearing in 1984. Microsoft and Apple worked together to create the TrueType format, deploying it with Windows 3.1 and MacOS System 7 in 1992. Apple had previously worked on other type technologies that went nowhere. After the debut of TrueType Apple tried applying QuickDraw GX to fonts and that was a bust too. Adobe improved upon Postscript fonts with the Multiple Master format. But then they killed the format in the late 1990's on their own. I think Type 1 MM fonts went nowhere at the time because very few foundries besides Adobe were developing them and Adobe charged a lot of money for such fonts. Oddly, Microsoft and Adobe worked together to develop the OpenType font format. And now the Multiple Master font concept is alive again with Variable Fonts. The OTF Variable format is proving to be much more popular; far more type foundries are developing Variable Fonts.

Even though Adobe created Postscript Type 1 font technology Adobe is choosing to remove Type 1 font support from its applications, starting with Photoshop CC this year. Type 1 font support will be removed from Illustrator, InDesign and all other Adobe applications in January 2023. I'm a bit annoyed by this since I have a decent collection of old Type 1 fonts. In the future I'll have to use a font conversion utility such as TransType to continue using them.

But type is a hard subject to sell, because a lot of people just don't see it the way you do. If you tell a company they need to pay a license for their custom font they're using on all their communication, you'll see how quickly they start to revert using Arial or Times New Roman instead, at least that's my experience...

It partly depends on the size of the company and/or how serious the company is about the quality of its branding. Some companies will hire type designers to create custom typefaces for their use. Even small businesses can get picky about it. A couple weeks ago I had to spend $126 for a license of the Sanchez type family because a local customer needed that to be used in the sign package. The cost didn't bother him at all. But that's a relatively small price compared to agency having to buy a multitude of typeface licenses for a bunch of computers.

That's part of the controversy with Clearview Highway. $795 times the number of computer systems used by an agency to create traffic signs can add up to a large number. The FHWA removed interim approval after at least a couple dozen or more state DOT agencies and local municipalities spend a lot of money on those fonts. The FHWA was forced to back-track and allow those agencies who already invested in Clearview to be able to continue using it. Even though the comparison study was flawed there is zero evidence whatsoever that Clearview is inferior in any way to Series Gothic.

I think it's an artefact of the way browsers (and possibly this BBS software) render HTML text. Most I've used parse multiple spaces as a single one. Why, I don't know. They were doing that back when NCSA Mosaic was the latest thing.

After seeing the spacing error I would have just posted an image of the spacing example.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I think it's an artefact of the way browsers (and possibly this BBS software) render HTML text. Most I've used parse multiple spaces as a single one. Why, I don't know. They were doing that back when NCSA Mosaic was the latest thing.

T h i s s e n t e n c e h a s t h r e e s p a c e s b e t w e e n w o r d s .

It's really a pain in the ass when posting source code that relies on spacing and indentation and the browser or BBS automatically left-aligns everything and there's no way to override it.

Like Frank correctly indicated: HTML is supposed to ignore unnecessary whitespace and there is a good reason for it. HTML is a markup language, as such it describes how documents are supposed to be interpreted. You don't know where words will start to wrap in a paragraph for example and you may want to use extra white space in the source document to indent stuff, to keep it more readable. As such, HTML collapses all white space to a single space. If you want to force a space, there has been a control character for it, the non-breaking space:  

Now, forum software may react to white-space differently. Some may convert extra white space to non-breaking spaces, while others may just collapse the white space. Yet others may pass it directly to the browser and let the browser figure it out.

The discussion was originally about type, not the legal aspects of it. You have been over-blowing the legal crap since page 2, starting with second guessing me about the use of the Adobe Fonts service (specifically about converting type to raw vector outlines) and going on and on from there.

It was and is a legitimate question, it was never intended to be blown up the way it was. Modern, subscription-type licenses introduce all kinds of new legal questions. But since we're both no IP lawyers, let's just keep the discussion out of here.

Arial tries to fit the square peg into the round hole and looks pretty ugly while trying to do it.

I agree on that, but I'm afraid we'll never get rid of it. Since Microsoft has switched to Calibri as their default font, Arial has been taking somewhat of a back-seat. Times New Roman was the old default, but many people consider that font to be "old looking" and therefore switched to the first "sans-serif" font in the list. While there are arguably better typefaces than Calibri, I consider it to be superior to Arial in most ways. What I like about Calibri is that it has some subtle detail to it, which only becomes apparent when you use it for larger headings. While Arial becomes uglier and harsher, the larger you make it.

Microsoft and Apple essentially created TrueType to remove leverage Adobe had with type technology. The Postscript Type 1 format preceded TrueType, first appearing in 1984. Microsoft and Apple worked together to create the TrueType format, deploying it with Windows 3.1 and MacOS System 7 in 1992. Apple had previously worked on other type technologies that went nowhere. After the debut of TrueType Apple tried applying QuickDraw GX to fonts and that was a bust too. Adobe improved upon Postscript fonts with the Multiple Master format. But then they killed the format in the late 1990's on their own. I think Type 1 MM fonts went nowhere at the time because very few foundries besides Adobe were developing them and Adobe charged a lot of money for such fonts. Oddly, Microsoft and Adobe worked together to develop the OpenType font format. And now the Multiple Master font concept is alive again with Variable Fonts. The OTF Variable format is proving to be much more popular; far more type foundries are developing Variable Fonts.

Even though Adobe created Postscript Type 1 font technology Adobe is choosing to remove Type 1 font support from its applications, starting with Photoshop CC this year. Type 1 font support will be removed from Illustrator, InDesign and all other Adobe applications in January 2023. I'm a bit annoyed by this since I have a decent collection of old Type 1 fonts. In the future I'll have to use a font conversion utility such as TransType to continue using them.

If I remember correctly, TrueType was originally developed by Apple, but then licensed to Microsoft for free. Apple has always had somewhat of a love-hate relationship with both Adobe and Microsoft... Still, I think that Apple has a lot to thank Adobe for, as their PS1 font technology and PostScript in general has Apple allowed to become the dominant player in the graphics market, back when the IBM PC was mostly a clunky text-based affair.

Interestingly, the first drafts of OpenType were drawn up by Microsoft and Adobe. Apple apparently wasn't invited back then... (On a personal note: I do prefer to work with TrueType's quadratic Bezier curves compared to the OpenType/CFF cubic Bezier curves...)

It partly depends on the size of the company and/or how serious the company is about the quality of its branding. Some companies will hire type designers to create custom typefaces for their use. Even small businesses can get picky about it. A couple weeks ago I had to spend $126 for a license of the Sanchez type family because a local customer needed that to be used in the sign package. The cost didn't bother him at all. But that's a relatively small price compared to agency having to buy a multitude of typeface licenses for a bunch of computers.

Well, that's the big problem with many of those font licenses. In practice, you need to license each and every workstation that can produce a document using said font. It's getting even more complicated when you're using Remote Desktop or Citrix farms, as many of those licenses, especially the really old ones, don't account for this kind of usage. But licensing those fonts for all those instances can become quite expensive, especially if you're using multiple fonts as part of your corporate identity. It's also a liability problem. I know that many big companies really want to have their licensing been accounted for, because they're often targeted by the licensing maffia of big players like Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. When they start auditing any middle-sized or bigger company, be sure they'll find some stuff to complain about and they often force settlements for hefty sums.

after[/I] at least a couple dozen or more state DOT agencies and local municipalities spend a lot of money on those fonts. The FHWA was forced to back-track and allow those agencies who already invested in Clearview to be able to continue using it. Even though the comparison study was flawed there is zero evidence whatsoever that Clearview is inferior in any way to Series Gothic.

I'd say that any font that a government uses should simply be in the public domain or at least it should offer a license that's free-of-use for any use by the government that commissioned or licensed it. A government simply should pay for the full, unlimited and perpetual license to a font, without any nasty limitations, otherwise it will only end up costing more in the end.

[Harold Hallikainen]

For body copy it's generally better to use serif typefaces that are designed specifically for large passages of text.

I had always thought this to be the case. The serifs help guide the eye along the line so text can be more tightly packed (with no extra leading). So, does a san serif typeface have a larger top side bearing and bottom side bearing than a serif typeface of the same point size? That is, for "tightly packed text," the characters would have to be smaller with san serif than serif to provide an adequate gap even though they are the same point size. As I understand it, the point size is just the distance from the baseline of one line of text to the baseline of the next line of tightly packed text. The actual size of the glyphs can be whatever the designer decides looks good.

Harold

[Bobby Henderson]

I agree on that, but I'm afraid we'll never get rid of it. Since Microsoft has switched to Calibri as their default font, Arial has been taking somewhat of a back-seat. Times New Roman was the old default, but many people consider that font to be "old looking" and therefore switched to the first "sans-serif" font in the list. While there are arguably better typefaces than Calibri, I consider it to be superior to Arial in most ways. What I like about Calibri is that it has some subtle detail to it, which only becomes apparent when you use it for larger headings. While Arial becomes uglier and harsher, the larger you make it.

Calibri is easier on the eyes than Arial. But it is not a "neutral" looking typeface. I've been seeing a lot of bad type combinations where people use Calibri with fonts that are not visually compatible.

If I remember correctly, TrueType was originally developed by Apple, but then licensed to Microsoft for free. Apple has always had somewhat of a love-hate relationship with both Adobe and Microsoft... Still, I think that Apple has a lot to thank Adobe for, as their PS1 font technology and PostScript in general has Apple allowed to become the dominant player in the graphics market, back when the IBM PC was mostly a clunky text-based affair.

Adobe literally made the classic MacOS the dominant platform for print graphics production from the late 1980's thru mid 1990's. Postscript was the first big thing, followed by applications like Illustrator and Photoshop. Other applications like Aldus PageMaker and Quark Xpress added to the trend. Adobe did release Windows versions of their applications, but it wasn't until the late 1990's that apps like Illustrator had 100% feature parity on both Windows and Mac platforms. And that was only forced by the boom in web graphics, much of it done on less expensive Windows PCs. In the earliest days of "desktop publishing" much of the infrastructure of the print graphics industry established itself on the Mac platform. It took many years for the same industry-specific tools to be able to work on the Windows platform.

Interestingly, the first drafts of OpenType were drawn up by Microsoft and Adobe. Apple apparently wasn't invited back then... (On a personal note: I do prefer to work with TrueType's quadratic Bezier curves compared to the OpenType/CFF cubic Bezier curves...)

OpenType fonts can contain either TrueTrue or Postscript based outlines. If I have to do any manual tweaking or embellishing of font letters I prefer having to do so with Postscript-based font outlines. Usually there are fewer anchor points. Most new OpenType fonts do contain TrueType outlines, particularly variable fonts.

Well, that's the big problem with many of those font licenses. In practice, you need to license each and every workstation that can produce a document using said font. It's getting even more complicated when you're using Remote Desktop or Citrix farms, as many of those licenses, especially the really old ones, don't account for this kind of usage. But licensing those fonts for all those instances can become quite expensive, especially if you're using multiple fonts as part of your corporate identity.

That's just a fact of life. It's not much different than a firm having to pay for various kinds of software licenses. Most type foundries vary their pricing on volume licenses. You'll pay more per "seat" when buying a license that covers 1-5 computers versus one that covers dozens.

It takes one hell of a lot of work and time to develop a good quality typeface. Some designers work on a particular typeface for years before releasing it to the public.

The quality standards bar for commercial type has been raised very high. New typefaces are expected to contain far more features than 1990's quality fonts. It's common for new fonts to cover more alphabets than just Latin. Greek and Cyrillic ranges are often included. Then all those alphabets need all the diacritic marks. Native small capitals is a popular feature. The font needs different number sets to cover proportional lining and tabular lining figures. And they require numerator and denominator figures to enable any fraction combination (plus throw in specially kerned custom fractions). Two and three letter ligatures such as "fl" or "ffl" are common. Alternate versions of letters, such a single-storey or double-storey "a" make a font more marketable. All of those features can balloon a font up from just a couple hundred glyphs to several hundred or even thousands of glyphs.

Most type design firms are very small outfits, often with only a single designer. They can't put in all that time and work for no pay.

I'd say that any font that a government uses should simply be in the public domain or at least it should offer a license that's free-of-use for any use by the government that commissioned or licensed it. A government simply should pay for the full, unlimited and perpetual license to a font, without any nasty limitations, otherwise it will only end up costing more in the end.

The situation with Clearview Highway is more complicated. The government did not fund the development and creation of that typeface. Universities in Pennsylvania and Texas did do extensive legibility studies between Clearview and Series Gothic. But overall the project was a commercial one. There are countless other examples of the government paying private contractors for all sorts of things. Paying for commercial fonts is hardly any different.

There are many free typefaces available, but all of them have a commercial angle attached. Some type designers will create one typeface as an open source creation in order to gain publicity to their other commercial typefaces. Companies like Google use free type as a loss leader for their other very commercial efforts. Clearview Highway doesn't fall into any of those categories. It's a specialized, niche-use typeface meant for a limited number of customers. That small market explains why the price is so high. The development costs can be spread out only so far.

So, does a san serif typeface have a larger top side bearing and bottom side bearing than a serif typeface of the same point size? That is, for "tightly packed text," the characters would have to be smaller with san serif than serif to provide an adequate gap even though they are the same point size. As I understand it, the point size is just the distance from the baseline of one line of text to the baseline of the next line of tightly packed text. The actual size of the glyphs can be whatever the designer decides looks good.

There really isn't a hard rule on it, but sans serif lettering tends to be easier to read with more generous line spacing. A type designer can bake some of that into a typeface design by making a letter smaller within its Em square box to take up less vertical space. That gets combined with the amount of leading an application sets for line spacing. 120% of point size is often the default.

Sans serif typefaces have a very wide variety of differences in their designs. Factors such as the relationship of lowercase letter heights (x-height) with capital letters make a big impact, as does the width and weight of letter strokes. Line spacing can even be slightly different for different weights within the same typeface. In modern print design that is often over-ridden by a document's baseline grid and overall grid-based page design.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Most type design firms are very small outfits, often with only a single designer. They can't put in all that time and work for no pay.

I have no problem with paying people for their work, and I'd rather pay a designer directly than via some big foundry that will put most of the money into their own pockets. I just wished it wasn't such a mess. A somewhat recent example, I have some fonts, which were designed by some independent designer. We've licensed them for our use in the past, which really was just a few dollars. Now I've got a client who wants to use it for their own projects too. The studio that created this font seems to be defunct and nobody is answering my calls anymore. So, how to go on from here? Essentially, this font has now become unusable for this purpose.

The situation with Clearview Highway is more complicated. The government did not fund the development and creation of that typeface. Universities in Pennsylvania and Texas did do extensive legibility studies between Clearview and Series Gothic. But overall the project was a commercial one. There are countless other examples of the government paying private contractors for all sorts of things. Paying for commercial fonts is hardly any different.

I don't see a problem in the government paying private contractors or private companies for a service. But I'd say that unless you're the government of Monaco, it's probably cheaper to buy a "flat usage" license for your standard fonts, instead of paying per workstation and/or user.

[Bobby Henderson]

I have no problem with paying people for their work, and I'd rather pay a designer directly than via some big foundry that will put most of the money into their own pockets.

Adobe and Monotype are the biggest companies selling type. Outside of those two there are very few other type foundries that I would call "big." URW and Font Bureau might qualify as big. When you move on to companies like House Industries, Letterhead Fonts or Comicraft the size drops considerably. Those companies often have limited distribution rights over the typefaces, hence the odd development with Font Bureau pulling its fonts from the Adobe Fonts service. Several type designers put their typeface creations back on the service via their own independent companies. More often that not when you buy a fonts package you're paying most of that money directly to the type designer. Online stores like MyFonts, FontShop and Fonts.com take a cut of the purchase price in return for hosting the fonts on their web sites. But that's a cost of doing business for a type designer.

In the case of Clearview Highway that typeface is sold by Terminal Design, which is a very small, independent company.

A somewhat recent example, I have some fonts, which were designed by some independent designer. We've licensed them for our use in the past, which really was just a few dollars. Now I've got a client who wants to use it for their own projects too. The studio that created this font seems to be defunct and nobody is answering my calls anymore. So, how to go on from here? Essentially, this font has now become unusable for this purpose.

Have you checked to see if the typeface is available through any other online font stores? Sometimes small type outfits get bought up by other companies or they change distribution arrangements from one online store to another.

I don't see a problem in the government paying private contractors or private companies for a service. But I'd say that unless you're the government of Monaco, it's probably cheaper to buy a "flat usage" license for your standard fonts, instead of paying per workstation and/or user.

I'm certain bigger firms, such as state department of transportation agencies or traffic sign departments in major cities, have negotiated much better terms when buying volume licenses of Clearview Highway. A smaller, private sign company that does DOT subcontracting work won't have the same buying power. The same goes for a small city government's traffic sign department. Fewer computers means paying closer to full price.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Adobe and Monotype are the biggest companies selling type. Outside of those two there are very few other type foundries that I would call "big." URW and Font Bureau might qualify as big. When you move on to companies like House Industries, Letterhead Fonts or Comicraft the size drops considerably. Those companies often have limited distribution rights over the typefaces, hence the odd development with Font Bureau pulling its fonts from the Adobe Fonts service. Several type designers put their typeface creations back on the service via their own independent companies. More often that not when you buy a fonts package you're paying most of that money directly to the type designer. Online stores like MyFonts, FontShop and Fonts.com take a cut of the purchase price in return for hosting the fonts on their web sites. But that's a cost of doing business for a type designer.

I guess you can add Microsoft to it too nowadays. They run their own type foundry and license most of their fonts as part of the Microsoft 365 service. There used to be many more medium-sized players back in the 1990s and early 2000s, but Adobe and Monotype did a good job at gobbling them all up.

Back in the late 1999s, for my day job, I worked for an Apple integrator. Those were the days that Apple almost vanished from the public eyes and I guess about 90% of all Macs were used by companies involved in graphics. One of our jobs was doing license audits at publishing houses and advertising agencies, so we could tell them were their issues were, before one of the big boys would tell them at one of their costly audits... And yes, that also included fonts... menial stuff that included big spreadsheets, lots of boxes with software, dusty printouts, illegible yellowed faxes and endless paperwork...

Have you checked to see if the typeface is available through any other online font stores? Sometimes small type outfits get bought up by other companies or they change distribution arrangements from one online store to another.

Sure, but the entire idea of this typeface being somewhat special was part of the appeal for this customer... I don't think this company or person ever published it to one of the common outlets and if they did, I guess it has since been pulled. People like to have "exclusive things", they often just don't want to pay for it...

But I sometimes wished there was something like a WORKING central copyright register, with the active need to register something and also to explicitly renew it. There is lots of stuff out there that's technically abandoned, but still covered by copyright.