AEacute/aeacute were used in Old English, though a macron is more common in modern renderings (and vowel length wasn't obligatorily indicated anyways). dotlessj exists, as far as I know, to provide support for floating diacritics.

Hi Dan
I tried to get to the bottom of this one some years ago. The thing is that you have to call The Danish Language Council to get the info. The woman that was present at a conference in Iceland many years ago, where these lists were made, works there. The list I'm talking about is the one from Evertype http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/danish.pdf. When I called she was on vacation, and then I moved out of the country. Try calling them and ask on +45 35 32 89 90. Office hours are mon-thur 10-12, and Friday 9.30-12.30. Let me know what they say. I have a feeling that those characters are redundant in Danish. I can't find any references of use in the Danish corpus http://ordnet.dk/ods/.

I have never believed in the Aringacute and I have actually talked to a couple of danish people, they all say the same – it is NOT needed in the danish language. They have never seen it.

I’m getting ready to kick 1 – 6 out of the fonts I am working on right now and I don’t have a clue about dotlessj. But I do think that some of these oddball characters raise an important issue that keeps coming up in conversations: font bloat. Why are font designers creating so many fonts with huge character sets to support languages we know nothing about? Are native speakers in northern, central, and eastern Europe using fonts from the US and Western Europe, or do they laugh at our wacky diacriticals and odd spacing?

I've had to set a j with an accent several times. From a comp's point of view, we can make up anything needed (in setting the job) as long as we have the pieces -- so retaining the dotless j would be a plus. Otherwise, it's FontLab & remake the font.

AEacute/aeacute and Oslashacute/oslashacute is used for modern scholarly transcription of Old Norse and Old Icelandic, marking distinctive opposition by quantity. The latter pair replaces the earlier OEacute/oeacute usage. Old Norse is still read and written by scholars and enthusiasts (myself included), and speakers of Icelandic and Faeroese (to some extent) can read it untranslated.

Edit: This shows a dictionary lookup for an Old Norse ("norrønt") dictionary hosted by the University of Oslo, with the "weird" characters available by input buttons.

Aha, I had a hunch this was the case. A bit of extra research points to the characters being used for transliteration from other Nordic languages into Danish. It's described in Inter-Nordic group on Information Technology Standardization (INSTA/IT): Nordic Cultural Requirements on Information Technology. INSTA technical report STRÍ TS3. Reykjavik: Icelandic Council for Standardization (STRÍ) 1992, ISBN 9979-9004-3-1, pp. 33-37

Sorry for the distraction: Charles, are the base glyphs (such as dotlessi and dotlessj) and diacritics which need to be kerned/moved over them useful to typesetters/compositors at all? What would you like to see included in fonts?

So should these characters be supported in anything other than faces intended for text use? Does anyone ever buy display faces to use for Old Norse or transliterating Nordic languages into Danish? Or are people who use these languages doing small projects using system fonts?

Aw common, don't be so lazy!! The glyphs mentioned are about 2 minutes worth of work once you have your basic characters done.

Aw common, don’t be so lazy!

My thoughts exactly.

I try not to be lazy, James! But my colleagues and I are producing hundreds of fonts a year. So cutting out a few superfluous glyphs [if they are in fact not really necessary for our customers…] from our character set would save some total testing time.

Plus, we have to have some wacky ascender and line gap settings sometimes because of the Aringacute and its effect on a font's bounding box sometimes. So, I would not cry to see it go.

You can leave out any character until a customer asks for it. :)

I think it's pretty safe to let Aringacute go. I think it can be regarded as a hypothetical glyph, unlike Oslashacute and AEacute, which are both standard letters in Old Norse. All Danish vowels can in theory be emphasised by an acute, but I have never, ever seen Å with an acute. In Norwegian and Swedish, only a, e and o can take acutes.

are the base glyphs (such as dotlessi and dotlessj) and diacritics which need to be kerned/moved over them useful to typesetters/compositors at all?

Note: positioning of combining diacritics over bases is a GPOS anchor attachment lookup, not kerning. Kerning affects the position of all subsequent glyphs, while anchor attachment is mark-specific.

The value of supporting dotless variants of soft-dotted letters and combining marks depends on the target languages. There are lots of languages in the world that rely on such mechanisms, because Unicode only includes precomposed diacritic letters for backwards compatibility. In effect, this means that only major languages that were supported in pre-Unicode charsets get precomposed diacritics: everyone else relies on combining marks.

My clients request such things, but then they tend to be either involved in internationalisation or in scholarly publishing.

One thing I do strongly recommend is to include Unicode combining mark character support for any accents used in precomposed glyphs in your font, not just the subset spacing accents (which are also backwards compatibility characters) and use the combining mark glyphs as components in composites. This has two benefits: it means that all your diacritic components can have shared x,y coordinates, rather than having different offsets with some components based on spacing diacritics and some on non-spacing, and it means that if you do decide to add GPOS anchor attachments you can use the component offsets to give you a head start.

By the way, oogonek and oogonekacute (not oogonekmacron, as Unicode erroneously states) are also necessary to write Old Norse, so I guess it doesn't make sense to include oslashacute and aeslashacute unless your font support these glyphs.

John -- There are lots of languages in the world that rely on such mechanisms, because Unicode only includes precomposed diacritic letters for backwards compatibility. In effect, this means that only major languages that were supported in pre-Unicode charsets get precomposed diacritics: everyone else relies on combining marks.

Which brings me back to my wish to avoid all precomposed diacritic letters (those that allow design-wise), play out the character/glyph distinction (rather than serving exactly one glyph per character and naming it so), and employ ccmp/mark/mkmk radically (rather than consider them as add-on). If only reality -- operating systems and applications -- were there yet ...

Good to know about a/Aringacute.

In addition to Dan's list, I wanted to know if anyone ever seen these signs in use too?

8. ¤ - Currency Sign (U+00A4)
9. ‰ - Permille / Per thousand (U+2030)

Plus, a silly question: How do we access the Multiply Sign (×) with a normal keyboard? :P

I have seen the currency sign used in financial newspapers and The Economist a few times, but those publications are working with custom fonts. I can’t find any evidence that Permille is ever used. There was a conversations about these two on Facebook where Jonathan Hoefler pointed out that H&FJ had examined thousands of annual reports and never seen these characters used which is why they dropped them from their character set.

The per mille sign shows up a lot in scientific typesetting, for instance when talking about isotope fractionation.

Sorry for the distraction: Charles, are the base glyphs (such as dotlessi and dotlessj) and diacritics which need to be kerned/moved over them useful to typesetters/compositors at all? What would you like to see included in fonts?

If you're a "normal" typesetter, yes, you need the base glyphs. All a typesetter can do is to laboriously make up the needed characters -- much as had to be done with a macron accent in the type 1 days.

At our shop, unless the occurrence of such characters is only once or twice in the job, we'll decline it if the designer insists on using a font where the EULA forbids modification. For fonts we can modify, our rule of thumb is the comps (both of them) are expected to make up such accented characters if they occur once or twice, otherwise, I'll make up the needed characters in the font, and write a ccmp feature if needed. It's all about what is fastest without leaving any little encoding or character lies in the final files.

Blood alcohol content is always measured in per mille in Norway, and the per mille sign is quite often used in tables, statistics and news graphics about drunk driving. I think the same goes for Sweden and Denmark, but I'm not quite sure about that.

Concerning the general currency symbol: On French, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish/Finnish keyboards, ¤ is accessible from any keyboard as shift-4, so it would be weird if that keystroke produced no character. Its supposed use is as a placeholder symbol when ₤ or ¥ or ₡ or even weirder currency symbols are unavailable, as a sort of fallback symbol, right?

On the subject of units used in measuring small quantities, one good reason why the micro character µ might sometimes benefit from being a distinct glyph from the Greek mu μ is that it is combined with Latin g to indicate micrograms µg. Less, commonly, it occurs with uppercase G in physics as an abbreviation for microgravity µG.

I think the same goes for Sweden and Denmark, but I’m not quite sure about that.
Yes, you most definitely need the 'promille' sign (as it is called in Danmark). It's used in statistics, physics, chemistry, economics, medicine and so on. That one can't be deleted.

Its supposed use is as a placeholder symbol when ₤ or ¥ or ₡ or even weirder currency symbols are unavailable, as a sort of fallback symbol, right?

Yes, but how many people actually typeset that sort of thing? As I noted above, the only times I’ve seen it used it was in newspapers that have custom fonts at their disposal.

The currency symbol (U+00A4) is a standard character in the Latin 1 character set and others; for that reason alone it should not be omitted from any font that claims to support that character set. Since the ANSI Latin 1 -- or a related codepage such as Windows CP 1252 -- is the first building block of pretty much any Latin script font, this character should be included in most fonts.

If you want to be discretionary in your support of characters that are not part of 8-bit codepages, and disagree with e.g. some inclusions in the WGL4 list (which deliberately errs on the side of inclusion), that's fine. But I recommend against cutting characters that are part of 8-bit codepages, if your font is going to claim support of those codepages in the OS/2 table.

The currency symbol (U+00A4):

I just love what Bringhurst (EOTS, p. 313) has to say about it: Since the symbol is parasitic (it takes up space on the font but offers nothing in return), louse might be a better name. Having no true function, it has no authentic form.

Hmm... I'm going to have to be convinced that it is necessary to support Old Norse in 21st century fonts. Where is this language used, aside from scholarly publications? Are books still printed in it? How many websites out there are writen in the language? Are contemporary typefaces even appropriate for something like this?

I agree, even if only for bad reasons: I am lazy and always in a hurry. Wouldn't it be great if there was some reasonably authoritative table telling the lazier among us which glyphs can be skipped, say for faces that are not meant to be used for scholarly materials and such. For example, I have stopped putting the lozenge, product, integral and such into fonts that I myself would not want to use for a maths book, in spite of them being in MacOS Roman. Could someone more experienced and trustworthy provide such list? Is it worth starting a thread for this, and if so would someone please do it?

Satyagraha, in a lot of fonts with a Finnish keyboard shift-4 brings out €, that weird currency ;^)

Old Norse never really died out, as long as the written language is still understood by speakers of Icelandic and to a great extent Faeroese (even Norwegians and I think Swedes and Danes get the general idea when reading it, but the complex grammar is largely incomprehensible without some education). Written Icelandic is virtually indistinguishable from Old Norse, though the pronunciation is quite different and the vocabulary is vastly increased, almost exclusively building on Norse roots, not by importing loanwords. There is a huge body of literature written in Old Norse, the Kings' sagas (including the great works of Snorri Sturluson) and the Icelanders' sagas probably the most read today. These are still printed in their original language or in bilingual versions. I own several of them.
Old Norse is still taught in the Norwegian equivalent of high school (at least, it was when I attended).
There are several web pages containing Old Norse texts, most of them suffer for lack of proper glyph support.

Just
some
very quick
links

A Google search of "hljoðs bið ek allar", the opening stanza of Voluspá in normalised Old Norse ortography, returns 927 hits, while a Google search for "Mieleni minun tekevi aivoni ajattelevi", the opening stanza of the Finnish national epos Kalevala, written in modern Finnish, returns 1200 hits.

@mili: Yes, the placement of the glyph only refers to the Norwegian keyboard. My bad. But can you write the ¤ with your Finnish keyboard?

Satyagraha, I can't find it straight on my mac, only through character or glyph palettes.

OK, the dotlessj is going to stay in, but I think that the other six glyphs are coming out. Thanks for the input everybody!

Mili, a little research shows that Finland now has a new keyboard standard with € on Shift+4, whereas Finland and Sweden before the new standard used identical keyboards with ¤ on Shift+4.

Thanks Satyagraha, there's always something new to learn!

But do Old Norse scholars, and Old Norse publishers, actually buy commercial fonts?

Scholars and scholastic publishers, it seems to me, want every obscure character/glyph ever used, and if a character is not in a system font will make hacks or acquire freeware fonts made by other scholars, rather than buy fonts.

I beg to differ with James: it can consume significant time to add a character to a typeface: upper case, lower case, small caps, all the weights, roman and italic--it adds up.

There's a lot of truth in that, Nick. Twenty years of no choice has made and hardened that habit. I think the situation would have been quite different if scholars had ever had a choice. Mediævalists today still don't, the only typefaces I know of to fully support Old Norse are Gentium and Junicode, both made by scholars, I think, and both freeware.

How do we chose what parts of Unicode not to support in our typefaces? Are all those weird and ugly African glyphs in Latin Additional 2 really needed? What about the archaic Greek and Cyrillic characters? Why do we still support Polytonic Greek, when that orthography is deprecated?

How do we chose what parts of Unicode not to support in our typefaces?

By focusing on users who actually buy our fonts and supporting languages we actually have a clue about. I really don’t know why I keep worrying about Central and Eastern European character support, because I’m not selling fonts there and I don’t have the inclination to build a library of publications from those regions to compare my work to. As I said above, for all I know I’m just wasting time building characters for people who are just laughing at the ignorant efforts of some guy whose knowledge of their alphabet was picked up entirely from four web sites.

I would be inclined to map a $ sign to all of those code-points. Then if customers want them its pretty clear as to what they need to do. You could go a step further and draw a [$50] glyph, although the fee might change subject to inflation.

I really don’t know why I keep worrying about Central and Eastern European character support, because I’m not selling fonts there

If you build it they will come!

Si, in our case, that would be a Euro sign… but I quite like the idea :-)

James (Puckett), I hear your pain! But CE and Eastern European language support is essential. Really, Cyrillic is too. These are languages and countries that cannot be ignored. The comparison with Old Norse is not apt. Of course, official Norwegian, Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, etc., are 100% essential to support. As are the official languages of all other European countries. But archaic, unofficial languages are another matter. Of course, we'd be happy to build in special support to any of our fonts if a customer would commission that. But I don't think that Old Norse (sorry, I don't want to pick on this language too much!) publishers represent a significant portion of our customer base.

It isn't just licensing to customers in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Russia, etc. It is licensing to companies down the street in Frankfurt who sell their products to consumers in those countries or do business there otherwise. I know that it might be a little different in New York, but we are long past the discussion-phase as far as these languages go. One can still decide not to support them at their peril, though.

I’m just wasting time building characters for people who are just laughing at the ignorant efforts of some guy...

welcome to the world of typeface design

Dan, have you had a look at the Adobe Latin Extended character sets?
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2008/08/extended_latin.html

In these the first six of your glyphs are relegated to the AL5 glyph set. The dotless j belongs to AL4 set, which is used for families with extensive language support on the scale of Arno & Hypatia.

...the only typefaces I know of to fully support Old Norse are Gentium and Junicode...

What should be added to those characters listed in the wiki entry?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse_alphabet

Oogonekacute/oogonekacute and AEacute/aeacute.

AEacute is in Latin Extended A, but not Oogonekacute.

So, Oogonekacute would be more useful than Aringacute....

re. Adobe character sets.

Looks like there is no standard for fonts, just each foundry coming up with its own encodings, and the users having to cope with that.

Perhaps Unicode could have done a better job of making its code pages practical.

Definitely. Aringacute is hypothetical, oogonekacute is not. In fact, Oogonekacute/oogoenacute is not in Unicode at all, they are erroneously rendered as Oogonekmacron/oogonekmacron (u+01EC/u+U1ED). Those characters have no use in any language I've ever heard of. Therefore, Private Use Area u+E20C/u+E60C have become unofficial standard encodings for Oogonekacute/oogonekacute amongst mediævalist-hackers.

These are languages and countries that cannot be ignored.

Why not? Why does it make more sense for me to try and support languages with no clue whether or not I’m doing it right than to leave that level of language support to companies like Linotype that can employ designers trained in such matters? Why aren’t I better off to spend my time doing a better job on languages I know about instead of burning up hours on stuff about which I’m clueless?

I'd only remark that if you don't support certain languages, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that those who use them won't by your fonts. Sadly, the reverse is not true . . .

…it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that those who use them won’t by your fonts.

That much is obvious. My point is that if I’m not doing the language support correctly in the first place, am I really doing anyone a favor by selling the font?

just do it correctly in the first place. typophile is a great resource that links in many cases to other resources that can help you educate yourself on such matters. for example, you might start with eth in the characters wiki...

Sindre--even if I were to include Oogonekacute in a typeface, would scholars buy it, or would they think that something else, such as insular g, was missing?

I have actually included what I naïvely assume to be support for Old English, Middle English, and Gothic Transliteration in the Modern Suite fonts (all weights and small caps), but AFAIK have not yet sold any fonts to the scholastic market. Admittedly, they might not be aware the Modern Suite exists, so how would I go about publicizing it?

hmmm, bad example on my part. i guess i have to more wiki-ing, but there IS a page for links to drawing international characters: http://typophile.com/node/20276

Nick—your first question is a hard one. I really don't know. Scholars and scientists are never satisfied with anything. That's why they're scholars and scientists.

If I were you, I would approach the relevant linguistic institutes of larger universities, the more prestigious, the better, and tell them I can solve their transcription problems once and for all. Make a highbrow-looking type specimen, with complex texts set in languages relevant to them. Send it by ordinary mail. Give them a telephone call subsequently. If you at all can stand being a salesman.

When some prestigious language institutes all of a sudden starts publishing much better looking papers, word-of-mouth and academic envy will work its magic. Possibly.

Regarding your wonderful Modern Suite, you'd have another selling point in that the Scotch Micro will make their notes so much more legible.

Quick note on OpenType spec requirements. If a font claims "code page" support it should contain all the characters in that code page. If it claims "Unicode range" support then it should include functional coverage for that range, and what constitutes functional is at the type designers discretion.

Scholars and scholastic publishers, it seems to me, want every obscure character/glyph ever used, and if a character is not in a system font will make hacks or acquire freeware fonts made by other scholars, rather than buy fonts.

The scholars generally won't buy them; they'll use Gentium. But the publishers do buy fonts, and they do take glyph coverage into account, as long as someone who knows typesetting has any say in the matter. For example, one publisher I've worked for a fair amount chose Minion Pro for their house style several years ago, specifically because they need a well-integrated polytonic Greek for a lot of their books. The same logic applies to Scotch Modern, but it's also more distinctive.

Sindre, I'm coming up on halfway through a two-year development of a set of fonts for the venerable academic publisher Brill. The current intent is for these fonts to be made freely available to scholars. They're the most extensive fonts I've made, and mediaevalist usage is one of the targeted fields.

Brill recently made some information about this project public via their annual report.
http://brill.nl/downloads/brillText.pdf

[I'm not responsible for the sheep-stealer subhead settings.]

The oogonekmacron is used in Kaska Dene (northwestern Canada). That said, there are a bunch of other vowel-diacritic combos in that language which require combining diacritics: a-ogonek-macron-acute. The oogonek, however, is very important for many indigenous languages in the Americas, notably Navajo.

John, that's fabulous news! That's a brilliant typeface. Is there an approximate release date yet?

Aringacute is a test for getting into the NBA.

ChrisL

John, will Brill have small caps and optical sizes for footnotes?

I should complete work on the Brill types in October 2010.

Nick, yes, the Brill types will have full smallcaps, plus a range of different numeral styles, symbols for critical apparatus, fraktur, and a pile of other stuff either already used in Brill publications or anticipated. Also GPOS mark-to-base and mark-to-mark positioning for arbitrary diacritics.

There won't be an optical size for footnotes, because the budget wasn't available, but Brill's standard footnote size is not very small. Their standard text is 11 cicero points and their notes and captions are 9 cicero points. So I'm designing the type to work well at both sizes.

That leaves a bit of a window for retail scholastic types: sans serif, and footnotes.

But otherwise, a blanket "non-commercial" licence for Brill will effectively kill any potential scholastic market for fonts, if freeware and Adobe and Microsoft bundling haven't already done so.

However, distribution via "fonts on CD with book" might play out differently.

Nick: a blanket “non-commercial” licence for Brill will effectively kill any potential scholastic market for fonts

Only among individual scholars. The market among publishers would remain.

Brill have not finalised their plans for how to release the fonts.

FWIW, certain types of street signs in LA have the "i" and the "j" sans dot.

Dan, contemporary?
People set non-contemporary stuff all the time (pardon the pun).

Satya, I've seen both of those in use.

>> "Having no true function, it has no authentic form."

That's b-s on so many levels.

> I would be inclined to map a $ sign to all of those code-points.

Plus an email address.
Or better yet: when you try to enter a missing character you
automatically get hooked up to a live chat with the foundry!

hhp

FWIW, certain types of street signs in LA have the “i” and the “j” sans dot.

Do you mean as an effect or in support of a non-english languages?

No, that's the standard they follow. I'm talking about
large, official highway signs. I'll post an image soon.

hhp

>No, that’s the standard they follow.

Maybe the dots were stolen?

Only among individual scholars.

That's not the scholastic market!
The primary (potential) scholastic market for fonts is not publishers, but educational institutions, and the scholars are faculty and students, who could buy (licence) the fonts they use, just as they or their institution buy the books they use.
A non-commercial licence of Brill fonts for students and faculty (assuming faculty are "non-commercial") would make Brill books a first-choice for mandatory text-books, but wouldn't Brill be ignoring a profit-centre in not charging for fonts?

This is difficult to think all the way through, but one would assume that other publishers will develop their own 6000-character non-commercial scholastic fonts, to stay in the game. If their fonts aren't as good as the Brill fonts, or are "similar to", then scholars (and institutions) who haven't bought Brill books will be able to use superior quality Brill fonts and not buy Brill books.

How about bundling "fonts on CD with book purchase"? That would consolidate everyone's understanding of the fonts' dual function in textbook and in student work.

Nick, I'll mention all these ideas as options when I meet with the Brill people later this year. Brill's idea in making fonts available to scholars would be a) to aid scholarship, something that they've been doing in various ways for 325 years and b) to attract scholars to publish with Brill. Fonts on CD with book purchase adds a cost for Brill, and restricts legitimate use of the fonts in a way that Brill might not see as beneficial. Anyway, I think all ideas are on the table at this stage.

I tend to agree with Nick on this one. As a newbie font designer I find myself quite disinclined to go near large character sets if I have to compete not only with Robert Slimbach’s bundled designs, but also with free fonts by Tiro. Of course, given the budget for scholarly work, that might be entirely irrelevant.

...gravy sucking pigs...

Well, scholars may get their fonts for free, but it's hardly their fault, and they are under no moral obligation to buy commercial fonts.

Similarly, small, independent foundries are under no moral obligation to become ragged-trousered philanthropists, providing character sets for markets that don't buy enough fonts to make a return on the investment required.

Those who do support minority encodings in their fonts have their own agendas: Brill wants to prosper in the academic publishing market; Microsoft and Adobe want to help sell their big money-makers (systems and applications); SIL (Gentium) is a religious organization; and freeware fonts created by academics are done on company time, to facilitate their work.

James, if you stick to display fonts, you do not have to worry about Old Norse or scholars IMHO. Then there is my rather naive assumption that if I include cyrillics in a font that becomes popular by some fluke, I'd be encouraging thousands more visitors for the pirate sites in Russia.

Nick, I agree with your position, but fear that the horse has bolted already.

Is there any need for ĸ kgreenlandic 0138 or ʼn napostrophe 0149 in display fonts?

Is there any need for ĸ kgreenlandic 0138 or ʼn napostrophe 0149 in display fonts?
No

But otherwise, a blanket “non-commercial” licence for Brill will effectively kill any potential scholastic market for fonts, if freeware and Adobe and Microsoft bundling haven’t already done so.

Actually, the Brill fonts prove the opposite. We (SIL) have a number of freely available fonts (Gentium and others) that do a reasonable job of meeting most scholars' need for linguistic Latin fonts. Brill took a good look at them, and decided that there were particular publishing needs that our fonts did not attempt to meet. So Brill decided to spend good money to hire an expert designer to spend months creating a new type family, and make them available to the publishing community. The existence of free fonts did not harm the market, but rather stimulated more commissioned work to fill in the existing gaps.

This is a benefit for everyone. Scholars get a wider variety of 'standard' fonts to use for research and publishing. Brill gets great PR and goodwill, and very likely a richer base of authors. Typographers may get better-quality fonts to use when typesetting odd academic texts. Designers get more fonts to study as they try to figure out what rather odd letters are 'supposed' to look like. Overall, the typographic quality of academic publications gets a boost.

Neither the Brill fonts, or ours, will meet all the needs. There will still be room for more work by professional designers. There may even be increased demand, as other publishers want to get into the game, and as the academic community grows in their appreciation for fine typography and fine type design.

I never used to spend money on beer - a result of growing up around mediocre American stuff. I didn't even like it when it was free at a party. After a few friends here in England bought me pints of English Real Ale, I got used to how good a beer could get, and now find myself making special visits to my favourite brewery. A free bit of the Good Stuff can develop a habit of paying for more of it.

The existence of free fonts did not harm the market, but rather stimulated more commissioned work to fill in the existing gaps.

I was referring to the market for fonts, not commissioned work.

The idea that flooding potential consumers with free product somehow stimulates the market is erroneous: while a small percentage of users may be interested enough to go out and buy something different than the bulk of their peers, it's a minority sale achieved at the cost of surrendering the bulk of the market. This situation may seem to benefit consumers, but it impoverishes content production in general, channelling it into the hands of a small group of commissioned workers who may be well paid, but undermining the potential greater income to be made from creative work by spreading it around. After all, you can't make money from something you don't own. The real money is in the mass market.

Do consumers benefit from the situation where content producers are not making mass sales? No, because they still have to pay for media, whether it be digital devices or internet access. So "free" digital product just shifts profit from the creative sector to the hardware sector (and that includes Internet access).

And ultimately, all consumers are content creators. So if, as a consumer, you play the game where you get free creative content, you are endorsing a system that restricts your ability to derive income from creative work.

Beyond that, creative work gets redefined, stripping its value, becoming craft and production work that is bought outright by manufacturers, rather than warranting "points".

Is there any need for ĸ kgreenlandic [...]

Kgreenlandic ("kra") was deprecated in 1973, and replaced with q.

Brill gets great PR and goodwill, and very likely a richer base of authors.

Not to spoil the party, but I would prefer that Brill lowered its excessive subscription prices for the poorer institutions in the Third World. THAT would be great PR.

. . .
Bert Vanderveen BNO

Commission a custom font from a top designer, making this font freely available, and lower their prices? You think they won the lottery?

I'm with Mr. Gaultney. We've had the font wars and the browser wars, now we're supposed to believe that Brill will squirrel the academic market for type if they do not charge for non-commercial use of their new font? Or at least ruin that fraction of the market not already ruined by the big boys' bundling of high-quality fonts with operating systems and design apps? I earn my living setting linguistically-challenging type, occasionally for Brill, and the appearance of this font will make it easier to replace my services. Happily, not everyone wants their publications to look like Brill's. Style still counts.

David

A free bit of the Good Stuff can develop a habit of paying for more of it.

I wonder how much good beer you would be willing to buy if the free stuff your friends turned you on to continued to flow from a tap in your kitchen, and never ran out?

Some people don't drink lousy beer (like American, Canadian
and Italian) even if it's free and flowing. Now, if you PAID me...

hhp

...the appearance of this font will make it easier to replace my services.

Then surely it would be in your interests if the font had to be sought out and purchased, a disincentive to cheap and cutthroat competition.

...not everyone wants their publications to look like Brill’s.

That's a point I've already made. The majority of users standardize on the free product, while a minority pay to be different.
The retail market is squeezed to the sidelines, the bell curve distorted.

Those involved in scholarly publishing have been hearing that the sky is falling so long now that we cannot help but take new threats with a certain equanimity. As for "cheap and cutthroat" competition, the usual strategy is to offer something better. Of course, one of the things we all appreciate about the font John Hudson is working on is that it isn't cheap (assuming he isn't some weirdo "ragged-trousered philanthropist").

As for John's work ever becoming a "profit center" for Brill, I have my doubts. It doesn't take a genius to suppose that Brill commissioned the font to simplify their production of scholarly material covering a very wide range of subject areas and languages (more subtle is the need control licensing for use in their on-line publications). Limiting the font's free distribution to published authors isn't practical: authors of books and articles not yet written are just as deserving -- and one hopes there will be sufficient scholarly "competition" so that poorer mss. can be rejected. Bert Vanderveen has already referred to Brill's prices as limiting readership, and many with access to an institutional subscription forego a personal purchase, especially when on-line is so convenient: does Brill want to look like they're trying to squeeze something extra out of individuals already accustomed to reading for free? I suspect they'd rather enjoy the gratitude of having made a tool developed for their own benefit available to anyone interested (where most of that category is both a prospective customer and makes library recommendations).

Then there's the current economic situation. But even here, beer offers us hope: according to this morning's National Public Radio, here in the U.S. craft beer (less than 2 million barrels per annum) is doing better despite the downturn. Anheuser-Busch may control much of the market, but there is room for competition based on quality.

David

> one of the things we all appreciate about the font
> John Hudson is working on is that it isn’t cheap

What's cheap and not cheap?
How much is Brill paying for the font(s)?

hhp

BTW, I'm not trying to be too clever. If this information is supposed to
be confidential, please ignore my question (at least the second one).

hhp

...the usual strategy is to offer something better.

I'll play that game if I have to, but I don't like the way big business bends the rules.

Bends? Big business MAKES the rules.
The rest is carefully crafted illusion.

hhp

Of course this information is confidential, Hrant; however, as Mr Goodrich assumes correctly, I am not some weirdo ragged-trouser philanthropist.

There are plenty of economic benefits to a company like Brill commissioning its own typeface at this time, in terms of simplifying the author-editor-production workflow, standardising on Unicode text processing, etc. The new type is also more space efficient than the Baskerville they have been using for a long time, and based on testing to date we gain a line or two per page, which over the length of a book, size of a print run and number of books they publish every year will reduce their paper costs per annum. I suspect the folks at Brill who approved the project have a pretty good idea of how long it will take to pay for itself.

Nick: The retail market is squeezed to the sidelines, the bell curve distorted.

This seems to assume that the retail font licensing market is naturally the central business of type, and hence something that marginalises this market is a distortion. I'd counter that the retail market as we know it is a recent phenomenon, invented in the latter 20th century during the phototype period. Prior to that, the manufacturing costs led to a closer balance of custom and off-the-shelf type purchase, with even the latter necessarily calculated as an investment cost for most customers. I make my living designing custom typefaces. I don't engage in the retail market at all, and I make no apologies about that: I reject the notion that there is something normal or preferred in the retailing of fonts, or that this market deserves some kind of protection.

...the retail market as we know it is a recent phenomenon...

I was comparing revenue from the volume retail sale of pre-designed fonts with revenue from custom work for single clients.
In that sense, font retailing has been going on a long time, as founders sold their type to printers in the days of letterpress.

I reject the notion that there is something normal or preferred in the retailing of fonts,

I agree, I don't think either custom or retail work is more normal or preferred. BTW, I make a significant part of my living from custom work.

However, is it fair that retail font manufacturers have to compete with custom fonts that are given away free (e.g. bundled) to help promote some other product such as computer operating systems (Microsoft), software applications (Adobe), and now books (Brill)?

...or that this market deserves some kind of protection.

It's not markets that deserve protection, but people, hence the fact that most governments have laws against unfair trade practices, to protect mom and pop shops from big business.

Nick,

You do realise the font is targeted at a very small and highly specialized market? I don't think Brill expects to see menus and business cards using their font. (OTOH, it seems they wouldn't be able to do anything against that.)

.. if the IPA characters were supported in more fonts, like, say, Danish or Icelandic characters (not too outrageous), they wouldn't need to commission a specialty font ..

...the font is targeted at a very small and highly specialized market?

Whether or not a business practice is unfair has nothing to do with its scale.

.. if the ... characters were supported in more fonts ... they wouldn’t need to commission a specialty font

My concern is that academics have no incentive to pay to licence my Modern Suite fonts, which contain support for at least one "ancient" language (Polytonic Greek), when they have ready access to Polytonic Greek fonts from large corporations that are not foundries (Adobe and Brill).

Are Greek scholars (as opposed to publishers) a viable font market? Why shouldn't they pay for their fonts?

If they choose to do so, many academics can pay for your fonts, and a surprising variety of other things (such as espresso machines), with the funny money of research grants. Style still counts.