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Why would we want to create another Viner Hand? That would be like reinventing the wheel.

So, fonts are expensive because it's VERY hard to make good ones. And there isn't much of a market for them (relatively speaking), so the price never drops.

The labor value theory of doesn't explain the price of Helvetica which has been around for 50 years and heavily used (and bought). It's more like, "Multi-million dollar corporations are using this font to make millions, if not billions of dollars. You are using our work to make lots of money, so we deserve a cut of the action." And corporations go, "Using Helvetica really does bring me that much more money than I spent on it." So thus the expensive prices even for insanely popular and old fonts.

The problem I have with their prices is that as an amateur, not-making-a-dime web site maker, the $1,300 CDN the price is too high for the value I would get from it. So I will stick to things that don't cost me nearly 2 weeks wages--the free Microsoft fonts.

In a sense, this is probably pareto-optimal, but the rest of the world is poorer for me using Microsoft's Arial instead of something they'd enjoy more.

(What I'd like is a differential pricing scheme where a home user can buy a properly licensed font for a lot less, while they can still charge out the whazoo to United Airlines)

for those who don't know, Futura is a totally awesome font that hardly any OS has by default

Yeah, and the reason no OS has it by default is because Linotype charges through the nose for it. The licensing costs are the primary reason Microsoft starting packaging Arial with Windows. Helvetica (also owned by Linotype) was too expensive.

It wasn't an issue of embedding the font, it was a matter of interactively generating the .pdf on a server as a preview.

Here:

http://image.linotype.com/files/pdf/licenseagreement_e.pdf

William

I was fine with the Arial example, but perhaps Helvetica would be a better choice. Still boring enough for income tax forms and I think still commonly installed on systems.

Actually, Helvetica isn't commonly installed in systems because Helvetica is something you have to buy. That's why Arial is so widespread. Microsoft wanted a Helvetica, but didn't want the Helvetica licensing fee. I found this out last year when I was using Photoshop to forge a city parking placard* at work. The typeface is Helvetica, and no one anywhere at my worksite had it. I had to go on Pirate Bay to find it.

* Exempts you from posted limits, including meters and school zones. I work for a very large school district. The city offers us placards, but the pointy-haired bosses decreed "bottom-level techs shall not be allowed to apply for placards, only managers", despite the fact that managers never leave the office, while techs are the ones trying to park near schools in a big city with predatory parking enforcement. So naturally I concluded that a color laser printer + a sample placard + a couple hours in Photoshop was the best solution.

I like Computer Modern Roman for articles, but for literature I love Weiss. It's well balanced (different letters seem about the same size), very even in colour balance (different letters have about the same amount of black-white), easily legible, and yet the letters are stylized enough to be interesting. The italics are especially good. Linotype sells the family for $95, I've not found it cheaper.

There's an excellent article here on the Arial/MS font bastardization issue.

Agreed .. I would much rather see the licensing and control flow back to the foundries like linotype who have a much better feel for layout and design than microsoft. If you're ever in NY, there's an excellent exhibit at the MoMA on Helvetica that has a 5 minute loop from Michael Price's excellent film.

Forgive me if this is old news to you, but have you heard of Linotype's FontExplorer X? Hands down the most tasteful, well-designed font management and repair utility I've ever seen on the Mac (i.e. on any computer, period). Beats the shit out of Suitcase and the rest of the holdovers from System 4.2. Best part is it's $free.

it's free and a good contender to the Extensis software, although they still have some polishing to do.

If client wants a commercial font, and publishing house doesn't have a licence to the commercial font, then the contract between client and publishing house needs to specify who pays for the font licence and who owns the font licence when the print job is complete.
[...]
Presumably you can sell on a 'second-hand' font licence, like you can sell on the right to use pretty much any kind of intellectual property ?

What you can and can't do with a commercially-licensed font naturally depends on the terms of the license. Let's look at some.

Here is Linotype's standard license. With regard to your first point, observe 1.4, which states that you do not need to own a license simply to print documents that use the font, i.e. a license is only needed to create or modify such documents; this implies that only designers and typesetters need licenses. With regard to selling licenses second-hand, observe 1.3: they permit it under certain strict conditions.

Here are Adobe's font licenses. They're pretty similar, and permit transferring the license to a third party in much the same way. Interestingly, Adobe appears to be stricter than Linotype: they require printers to own a valid license as well, even if they are only printing a document that you created. This may be why so many unlicensed Adobe products were found in this raid.

Note that font licenses do tend to be valid contracts; typically you are presented with the license before you have made any payment, and in the case of more expensive fonts you may even have to provide a physical signature. These aren't dodgy shrink-wrap EULAs of the sort we all hate so much.

For your other point:
Can you rent fonts, like you can rent cars ? You might only need it for one print job; or you might need to own the licence like you own a car, to use every day for years and years.

That is entirely up to the person issuing the licenses; the answer is typically "no" (assuming you live in a jurisdiction where it's possible to prohibit this). But with the price of a perpetual license to a single weight of a font typically being between $10 and $30, it's unlikely in practice that you'd save much money that way anyway. Just buy the weights the job needs -- it's peanuts compared to the other expenses.

If it's not copyright law that's protecting them, then what is?

Some fonts *are* programs, like Postscript. Some are bunches of black dots (or other shapes like lines or ovals, or other colors, especially grays if you like anti-aliasing.) Some are bunches of equations. Some are programs in languages other than Postscript that implement equations to produce black dots. Some are stacks of twisty little metal pieces, all different, carved by hand. Some are programs to produce stacks of twisty little metal pieces.

The Times New Roman typeface was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent in 1932. Everything that produces proportional characters since then has, at a minimum, tried to imitate Times New Roman exactly. The old proportional spacing IBM machines and MS Word try to be identical. The differences between MS Times New Roman and the 1932 Times New Roman are very small.

Times Roman was designed in the 1770s for the Times of London.

Someone was discussing this later in the story, and I looked it up. The Times New Roman typeface was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent in 1932.

Everything that produces proportional characters since then has, at a minimum, tried to imitate Times New Roman exactly. The old proportional spacing IBM Selectric typewriters and MS Word look identical because they are trying to be exactly identical.

The Times New Roman typeface was designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent in 1932. Everything that produces proportional characters since then has, at a minimum, tried to imitate Times New Roman exactly. The old proportional spacing IBM Selectric typewriters and MS Word look identical because they are trying to be identical.

The others are: Bembo, Garamond Condensed