Amy, if you dig around using google's advanced search, I'd be willing to bet you find a few instances of people appreciating others' critiques and comments enough to send a copy of the completed typeface.

Sorry Tiffany, I"m not sure I understand that reply. I'm not interested in whether typefaces are complete or not - I am interested in the designers and their motivations for posting typefaces to the web.

Amy, note that giving away a font and putting it in the public domain aren't strictly speaking the same. If a font is in the public domain, you can derive other works off of it.

I haven't, but I'm just in the process of designing my first real typeface. I hope to earn big bucks from it. (OK, I hope to earn enough money to upgrade to the new CS2.)

>... I hope to earn big bucks from it. (OK, I hope to earn enough money to upgrade to the new CS2.)<

Now that's the spirit :-)

I was thinking that perhaps finding a designer that has done this you might be able to ask them specifically.

Not very many small foundries do offer type for free. Well, that isn't true if you think about Astigmatic and Font Diner. But, their type is mostly display. However, that doesn't matter in regards to your question, does it?

I think there are a number of reasons why type designers give fonts away. Here a few that come to mind:

1. Promotional purposes. The idea is to give away a free sample to generate interest and good will with hopes that people will pay for other fonts offered.

2. Specialized non-commercial niche. There are some areas such as academia or hobbies for which type designers, usually amateurs, create fonts to fulfill some special purpose. The fonts are given away out of a sense of sharing with others who have the same interest.

3. Lack of confidence. Novice type designers or others who may just be dabbling in type design give fonts away just because they don't think their fonts are good enough to charge money. Often, these fonts are incomplete or untested. By giving the font away, the designer absolves him or herself of responsibility for how the font performs. (I suspect that most freeware fonts fall into this category.)

4. Idealism. Some type designers give away their fonts as part of the free software subculture. This is a nice idea, but I suspect these people have some other source of income and lots of free time. (BTW, giving away commercial fonts created by others is not idealism, it's piracy.)

5. Hopelessness. Some type designers give away their fonts in the belief that it's not possible to make money in type design (not actually true, btw) and see it as a "labor of love."

6. Public service. Sometimes a fonts designed for some practical purpose are given away to gain wide distribution, such as web fonts or system fonts. It may also be that free alternatives are already available from other sources. Bitstream's free Vera fonts are an example of this. Their commercial font business does well enough that they can afford to do this as a public service. My font Anonymous is a similar case. On one hand, it was derived from an existing freeware bitmap font and it only seemed right to keep it free. On the other hand, I saw it as a way to draw visitors to my site and demonstrate the quality of the commercial fonts I offer (see reason 1 above).

7. Lack of authorship. By this I mean people who trace or autotrace existing fonts from old specimen books, often without much skill, and give fonts their fonts away because they wouldn't feel right about charging for something that took so little effort. (This can be like numbers 3 and 4 above, but for people without original ideas.)

I'm sure there are other reasons, and I'm sure that some of these are colored by my own point of view as someone who makes a substantial part of his income from selling fonts.

I haven't designed any fonts, or typefaces, that I've given away. However, the "Panoptic" alphabet (which emerged in the process of designing the typeface Panoptica) is in the public domain, because I haven't patented it. Too much trouble and expense, and besides, I'd be interested to see other interpretations of the alphabet, although there's not a big market for monowidth unicase typefaces!

Mark, this is a great answer and maps closely to my observations of free fonts, at least on the Web.

With respect to 6, there's often a business motive in giving stuff away, especially if the font is wrapped in a pretty restrictive license. I think the Vera fonts are a case in point. Bitstream hopes that they�ll get some custom work out of the arrangement with Gnome, or that customers will want the better hinted Prima versions. Likewise with our �Web fonts� we gave them away for free to help establish them as the standard for Web typography.

There�s also another element to 3 namely hassle. It�s very easy to post a free font - you zip it up and stick it on your site. But setting up an ecommerce site is hard, even setting up an account with MyFonts involves real work.

Cheers, Si

Panoptica is one of my favorite of your fonts, Nick.

I have not yet released a real font, but plan to release my Century Catalogue under a free software license. I'm not sure about the others; in part, we'll see how the first one goes.

I have a good reason to release the CCat for free; I would like it to be one of a set of fonts useful for typesetting mathematics in TeX, and for it to have any real chance of catching on, it has to be released as free software. Otherwise, among other things, it won't ship with Linux distributions and so on. In addition to TeX, I'm developing some of my own mathematics software (derived from Metamath, also released as free software, in this case GPL), and, again, I'd very much like this font to be part of the free release.

All seven of Mark's points apply, to different degrees. The design of Century Catalogue is clearly in the public domain, although I am putting a lot of effort into making a good digitization.

I have not yet chosen the actual license under which I will distribute the font. It will almost certainly be compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines, as that is pretty much the gold standard for making sure that the license is compatible with other free software. I doubt seriously it will be public domain. I would like to keep rip-off artists from piling my font in with a trillion others on scammy download sites and pay CD's, I would like to, but I am not yet sure to what extent that's possible while still remaining within the DFSG.

> There�s also another element to 3 namely hassle. It�s very easy to post a free font - you zip it up and stick it on your site. But setting up an ecommerce site is hard, even setting up an account with MyFonts involves real work.

Yes, that's occurred to me too but I forgot to mention it.

>Panoptica is one of my favorite of your fonts, Nick.

Thanks Mark, Coquette is my favorite of yours.

However, I think Refrigerator would be quite suitable for a "panoptic" alphabet version...

Hmm. Interesting idea. I'll keep that in mind.

By the way, in reason number 7 I mean the quick-and-dirty kind of "revivals" you often see on free font sites, not careful, studied revivals. What you're doing, Raph, is squarely in the latter category, and I think it's turning out very nicely, too. It's unusual for something with that amount of effort put into it to be given away.

> I would like it to be one of a set of fonts useful for typesetting mathematics in TeX

I do hope you plan standard TT and T1 versions targeting non-TeX users as well... As a member of that community, I would prefer to pay for Century Catalogue so that it retains the lustre of its historic origins - and you get some kind of direct return, however modest, for your own creative and technical investment - than see it featured on an upcoming installment of fontleech.

Of course, your strategy makes total sense in the TeX context, and it may not be feasible to support two different licensing arrangements. But it might be worth considering.

You could sell a "posh" OpenType version with small caps and oldstyle figures (not used in math setting?).

I respect your goals of releasing your font and mathematics work free, Raph, but I really don't get the concept. Academics are paid by their universities, and don't get paid for journal articles. It makes sense to follow that model to some extent if you are being paid as an academic, but I gather you are a graduate student. Your font is an impressive piece of work and I am sure took many weeks of full days to produce. Your math work probably much more. Will you be compensated in some way for your time and your accomplishments?

This - a font and perhaps your math publishing software - is different from a Journal article in that it is a product that is sold for use. I can see that an operating system like linux, which is massive and many people can make contributions to, can fruitfully grow open source. But I really wonder about applications, which is what you are developing here.

Mark, nice list, but you forgot to mention evilness as some typophiles stated once that free things promote laziness and degrade morale.

I�m sorry to bring this back again but I can�t help myself finding this stingyness hilarious.

>stingyness

Let me explain my thinking on this. Most people have to work for a living. If they get paid for designing type or creating math software, then they can go on doing it. If they don't they have to do something else.

That is why philosophically, I think the 'free work' concept is bogus - just as those who think nobody is hurt by pirating music, because it 'ought' to be free.

Of course hobbyists can do good work, but sustained excellence of somebody like a Matthew Carter just isn't going to happen unless they get paid. There are free niches, but it is an illusion to think the market can get excellence without paying somebody for it. Again, the hippie idea 'everybody should just do everything for free' is just bogus.

Selling something for money is certainly not stinginess. 99% of the world's population must do this to survive, myself included.

People who do give fonts, software, and other things away for free still derive benefits. It might be fame, it might be new work avenues, it might just be a sense of happiness or charity. There's nothing wrong with any of those.

Some people also don't believe in copyright or patents. Not believing in these things doesn't make a person evil.

Nick: yes, I think that selling an OpenType version commercially may well be the way to go. It's not so much a matter of poshness as how the features are packaged. TeX does in fact do small caps, but accomplishes them by choosing a different optical scale of the base font. Yes, TeX does optical scaling, and has since before Microsoft Word was in diapers. This is one of the reasons why doing an optically scaled series of this font is so appealing -- people will be able to use the optical scaling without having to twist themselves into pretzels. You are correct that TeX does not have oldstyle figures in its base glyph complement, and that they're unusual in math setting.

From a technical point of view, I'd need to distribute the free version as a PostScript Type 1 font, because that's what the PDF export from TeX needs as its raw materials. TeX's own font format, Metafont, is pretty much dead these days.

I have deep roots in the free software culture, but am not a fanatic. In this particular case, it's mostly a pragmatic decision. Many, many companies have tried to build proprietary extensions on top of TeX (including simply selling fonts for it), with absolutely no success. I would much rather see my work used and the overall typographic quality of math publications raised than follow those footsteps.

In any case, I don't believe that free software is for everybody, but have warm feelings for its own particular strengths and charms. In any case, William, the analogy here is not people who pirate music, but people who release their own music for free. Maybe that does depress the market for commercial work, but at the same time I doubt that Britney Spears' corporate owners lose much sleep over the vast quantities of jam band music available at etree.org.

I'd also like to bring up the EULA issue; users of my free fonts will be able to add new glyphs or otherwise customize them, without having to worry about running afoul of the EULA.

>the analogy here is not people who pirate music, but people who release their own music for free

That is true. My point was that some who pirate music - and perhaps also fonts - do it on the excuse that it all 'ought to be' free. And that argument I was rejecting.

It sounds like for the market you want to serve, there is no way to be compensated directly for it. But my point is that being compensated will sustain you to do other worthwhile projects of your choosing. So if you can include the font as part of your math publishing software, and charge for that, all the better, in my view. If that must be free, well so be it; I just worry about you being able to sustain the fine work you are doing.

Good luck with all of it!

>giving away a font and putting it in the public domain aren't strictly speaking the same. If a font is in the public domain, you can derive other works off of it.

Point taken. There are various degrees to which you can give the public access to a font - I have come across stipulations about commercial versus private use like, "if you use these fonts commercially, give a donation to Doctors Without Borders" (Manfred Klein's fonts http://moorstation.org/typoasis/designers.klein). Other options include creative commons licenses that allow flexible copyright for creative work (http://creativecommons.org/license) as well as full-on copyleft licenses that insist that all derivative works from the free work remain free and in the public domain.

thanks for the input so far,everyone - really interesting stuff.

Another motive, or lack thereof, more accurately:

Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
(The title of a classic socialist novel)
http://www.unionhistory.info/ragged/ragged.php

>Again, the hippie idea 'everybody should just do everything for free' is just bogus.

Like a lot of political ideals, it's unworkable unless everybody plays the game. Similarly, you can't dismiss an idea just because it's never worked in the past.

i have been working for two years now in developing a flexible bitmap font system called Elementar. this work originated as my diploma work and is currently being further developed as my master thesis.

in july this project has to leave the achademical world and become autonomous � i won't have support from scholarships anymore and need to start making some $$ with it.

...so i am trying to figure out myself how to conciliate achademic and commercial interests.

my idea so far is to release the fonts under two different licenses: one for commercial and other for non-commercial use.

1) i want people to be able to get the fonts for free, to experiment with it and to contribute in the further development of the Elementar system

2) i would like to sell the fonts for people who want to use them in commercial projects � with different conditions and values for use in websites / oems

i thought about using the creative commons license for the non-commercial release � but i have never seen this license being used for fonts... � i think the idea of having the license embedded in your website to enable searching machines to read it very interesting.

i also think it would be better to send the fonts per email rather than to have them available for download � a way to build a database of who has the non-commercial licenses.

--

these are my ideas so far, any comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated... :-)

ps: the Elementar fonts have been originally designed as 1-bit pixelfonts, but since last year there are greyscale versions of some of the fonts commercially available at ultrafonts.

"There are free niches, but it is an illusion to think the market can get excellence without paying somebody for it. Again, the hippie idea 'everybody should just do everything for free' is just bogus."

Open Source software seems to disprove that. Granted, Open Source software development is certainly not the same as digital type design.

CreativeCommons is a great concept...it allows folks to both give away work for not cost, but retain various levels of credit and rights ownerhip, which preserves some value for the product...even if it's not a monetary value.

I think there are a number of reasons why type designers give fonts away. Here a few that come to mind: <...> 1. <...> 2. <...> 3.<...>

There is another, very special, variety of the free font distribution. It could be considered 'niche' if the numbers of the target users of those fonts were not in the millions, or tens of millions.

The non-Latin 'extensions' of the popular Western typefaces�Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, Hebrew, etc.�developed by the enthusiasts (actually, hackers) are most often given away. 99 per cent of the time those 'extensions' are developed without knowledge, let alone consent, of the copyright owners�designers, foundries or distributors.

It is ironic that some of those unbidden 'localisers' even provide references to the original typefaces, and credit their designers�without ever asking their permission for meddling with their designs. And then those bootleg non-Latins are given away. The quality of those freeware fonts is not an issue, of course: one shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

One consequence of the development and distribution of those unauthorised derivates is that along with a set of non-Latin glyphs they include the entire complement of the original 7-bit Latin glyphs. That is quite enough to set texts in English, so this covers 90 per cent of the demand for typesetting in foreign languages that exists among the users of non-Latin fonts. The inability to set texts in German, French, Spanish, etc., does not feel like a great problem to most.

Even if the real market for the 'payware' digital fonts existed in, say, Russia, the unauthorised localisation would leave very few chances to the sales of the 'real thing' there.

Of course, the OpenType technology takes this problem to a whole new level. In one quick sweep, a font hacker can snatch so much more than he or she used to in the recent past: small caps, ligatures, alternate alphabetical glyphs and figures, etc.

I know that many designers of the original typefaces feel pretty frustrated with the practice I am referring to�even if the development of the non-Latin versions of their typefaces is not at the top of their own production schedules. But now, at the age of Unicode, everything feels so different than ten years ago.

Maxim: excellent point! I think that GPL or other freely licensed fonts may be an excellent alternative for people who want to keep things squeaky-clean.

Indeed, we've seen exactly this happen with the Ghostscript fonts. The company I work for, Artifex Software, started the ball rolling by licensing the rights from URW to release a complete set of PostScript Level 2 clone fonts under the GPL. Valek Filippov then added Cyrillic glyphs and released his new versions. This version was picked up by Red Hat for Linux distributions, with some fixes and touch-ups by Owen Taylor. Today, we distribute the 1.06 version of these fonts, and plan to set up a repository to import the newest (1.07pre22) version, which lots of extra local language support, including Uzbek and Vietnamese. I personally am very happy that all this activity is out there in the open.

Unauthorized localization is piracy, Maxim, not an example of a type designer giving away a free font.

Nonetheless, despite the situation you describe, I am considering putting non-western characters in some OpenType fonts. While there is not much of a foreign market for a Western foundry doing this, there appear to be two potential purchasers of such fonts: "ethnic" publishers catering to their communities in the West, and Western corporations marketing their product in non-Latin countries.

Also, I would enjoy the challenge of designing glyphs for different alphabets.

In fact, now that I think of it, there are a number of typefaces I've designed "for the challenge" (such as Alphaville, 4,000 and something on the Myfonts sales chart), not because there is any demand for them. Perhaps I should be giving those away. Another category, Vanity Publishing?

But maybe not. Typefaces that are not popular now may catch on in the future. And perhaps countries where software piracy is rife now will go legit? Is that a possibility, Maxim?

Did anyone mention charity fundraising?

A lot of foundries and designers have contributed fonts to fundraisers such as Building Letters and Font Aid.

> Unauthorized localization is piracy, Maxim, not an example of a type designer giving away a free font.

Unfortunately, this is a bit more complex, and more complicated... The unauthorised development of the non-Latin versions of the commercial Western typefaces is the daily practice in so many countries.

Nick, you know well that many EULAs allow the modification of fonts�for private use, of course. That makes playing with the letterforms designed by somebody else�altering them, developing new glyphs matching the original ones, etc., etc.�legal. It is legal even if it is, well, unethical. By the way, that bit about the ethics is fiercely debated by the type hackers. But It all becomes illegal the moment one starts distributing those hacked fonts�for profit or for free, does not matter.

Obviously, such distribution is acceptable to the users of the bootleg non-Latins. Let's face it: Napster enjoyed huge popularity with millions of people, world-wide. And those who offer the fonts, or other software for free are�most predictably�popular with the masses. Who cares whether those distributors own the rights to the products they 'share', right? They present their dubious activities as an ultimate virtue, as a service to the community. And, alas, this is how they are seen by so many people out there.

Those generous sharers of other people's property, and their client�le go to great lengths to justify their right, if not their duty) to the distribution of the unauthorised non-Latin 'extensions'. Their favourite argument, of course, is, 'Oh, c'mon, look at that honourable and respectable foundry X: how many clones does it offer of the typefaces that originated with the foundries Y and Z, and vice versa? Why can they get away with it? Everyone steals.', etc. So that laissez-faire attitude, that assumes that no one is entirely clean or innocent, pervades.

And so it goes.

Amy, you end your original message by asking me for help. I'm one of those people you wonder about. I'll help if you pay me 50 Euro. (Why would anybody want to help you for free?)

There is a Russian saying: Free is only the cheese in a mousetrap. My dad used to tell it.


PS. This message is free because of my lack of confidence, it's hopelessness, and the lack of authorship.

Sorry Sergej,
haven't got 50 Euro, I'm just a poor student. But I like the mousetrap analogy - thanks Dad.

>This message is free because of my lack of confidence, it's hopelessness, and the lack of authorship.

And I thought you were an independently wealthy altruist.

I give 50% discount to students �

I once gave a font for free, after one or two years of having completed its design. I did it because I had gotten many things for free over the internet, and because I had no big money concerns. I also was curious if I was ever going to see my font used somewhere (a few years later I did, on some fanzine, and it felt great).

As someone who gave away over 200 fonts, I think I can add something to the discussion. Idealism and public service did have something to do with it but, for me, it was a way of cutting my teeth, typographically speaking, and a way of determining where the public's taste lie.

A lot of my earliest (1997) stuff was, in retrospect, pretty crappy (mostly spacing issues, but some design inconsistencies, too). Practice, practice, practice, and things gradually improved. But progress is not made in a vacuum: I have to acknowledge a tremendous debt to Ilene Strizver, who helped me develop my commercial releases through ITC and Agfa Monotype.

I probably would have continued developing freeware fonts while peddling commercial ones as well, if not for a few sad facts...

a) if you give stuff away, there are sorry bastards out there who will steal it and sell it; and

b) if you give stuff away, there are clueless individuals out there who somehow expect you to personally give them more of your time (I want you to design a font for me, or copy someone else's design, or re-design your website to suit me, or...).

I'm not sure which is worse, the thieves or the ingrates, but eventually I got fed up with feeding their kind (so much for the idealismj argument). So, was it all worth it? For the experience AND the exposure, yes, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone.

nick! i'm a great fan of your work and hopefully i don't fall into the ingrates category (definately not a theif). It's great to have you on the forum boards! but could you stop outbidding me on ebay? ;^D

oh, and welcome to typophile!

A related mini-interview with Dirk Uhlenbrock of Fontomas fame
can be read at Typographica.

Amy: Sergei was undoubtedly being ironic. The free software philosophy is that sharing code that one writes is a public service, much like offering advice and help when asked.

I just did a little surfing, and found that most of the standard fonts shipping as free software are missing from dafonts; I checked the Nimbus family (from URW, clones of the Adobe Postscript base set), Vera, and Utopia. Does anybody have more insight into this?

I don't know if URW Nimbus were clones of Adobe Postscript base set, but I do know that URW Nimbus Sans is on of the best Helvetica families around.

Raph - Nimbus a clone of the Adobe Postscript set? Where do you get your information from?

1. Adobe wouldn't have Helvetica at all if it weren't for URW, because Adobe couldn't get their Helvetica actually to work with ATM until URW kindly helped them out with completely new data. You know, it's one thing to acquire the rights to the name 'Helvetica'. It's quite another to be able to digitize and manufacture it. That Adobe could not do.

2. URW Nimbus is considered by Helvetica experts to be one of the three families of improved Helveticas, which comprise [whatever Berthold calls the version of AkGro which is in fact an improved Helvetica - is it AG Buch? I forget], Helvetica Neue, and URW Nimbus. I believe I have those in the right chronological order. An improved Helvetica was actually first designed by Berthold; Linotype then did its version, and Karow considers Nimbus Sans to be an amalgamation of the best ideas of all three. Karow's claim is not idle boasting, as JM's post illustrates.

In any case, Berthold was first with the idea of fixing some of Helvetica's more egregious faults. Lino Neue Helvetica was a response.

Nimbus a clone of the Adobe Postscript set? Where does this (mis)information come from?

1. Adobe wouldn't have Helvetica at all if it weren't for URW, because Adobe couldn't get their Helvetica actually to work with ATM until URW kindly helped them out by supplying completely new data. You know, it's one thing to acquire the rights to the name 'Helvetica'. It's quite another to be able to digitize and manufacture it. That Adobe could not do.

2. URW Nimbus is considered by Helvetica experts to be one of the three principal families of improved Helveticas, which comprise [whatever Berthold calls the version of AkGro which is in fact an improved Helvetica - is it AG Buch? I forget], Helvetica Neue, and URW Nimbus. I believe I have those in the right chronological order. An improved Helvetica was actually first designed by Berthold; Linotype then did its version, and Karow considers Nimbus Sans to be an amalgamation of the best ideas of all three. Karow's claim is not idle boasting, as JM's post illustrates.

In any case, Berthold was first with the idea of fixing some of Helvetica's more egregious faults. Lino Neue Helvetica was a response.

And by the way, even if Nimbus Sans were a clone of Helvetica, how could it ever be viewed as a clone of the 'Adobe Postscript set'? URW was cloning Helvetica (in fact it was its first job) when John Warnock was still in short pants. Surely a quick Google search . . . ?

"whatever Berthold calls the version of AkGro which is in fact an improved Helvetica - is it AG Buch?"

Bill, if my memory isn�t betraying me, Akzidenz Grotesk is older than Helv�tica, Helv�tica is a rework of Azkidenz Grotesk.

Check Out
http://www.identifont.com/show?FU

Bill's correct, H�ctor. AG Book is a Helvetified version of Akzidenz Grotesk.
The differences are clear enough for us, but almost imperceptible for the
common user.
(Wow, do I sound conceited or what !?)

>So, was it all worth it? For the experience AND the exposure, yes, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone.

Standard gangsta rapstar apologia.

You both are right Bill and Yves, actually the only Akzienz Grotesk feature I could find in this font is the name.

It�s like if someone reworked Times and named it Sabon.