Ascender Corp. and Microsoft have entered into in agreement allowing Ascender to distribute Microsoft’s fonts, including the Windows Core Fonts and the Microsoft Web Fonts, which up until about two-and-a-half years ago were available free of charge on Microsoft’s web site.
One of the benefits of this agreement, according to Microsoft Typography‘s Simon Daniels, is that Ascender can now create derivatives of these fonts, for example, small caps for Georgia or intermediate weights of Verdana. Daniels believes that granting this privilege to Ascender rather than setting the typefaces loose via a free software license gives Microsoft some degree of control over the quality of these derivatives.
But now those law-abiding users who would rather avoid Microsoft products will have to shell out $110 for a license to use Georgia. Microsoft successfully injected these well-crafted fonts into the fabric of the web by offering them free of charge to the point where web developers now take their presence for granted. Pulling the plug on free distribution was one thing, but now, in a breach of unwritten Internet etiquette, they expect people to pay for what was once costless. According to Microsoft, the reason they pulled the fonts (and, assumedly, are now charging for their license) is to curb large-scale abuse, but it would be naive to believe individual users are off the radar.
Update, April 20 — SC
Simon Daniels has been active in the discussion below and clarifies a couple issues regarding the Web Fonts license:
- MS will continue to bundle Web core fonts such as Georgia and Verdana in future Windows releases.
- The motivation for licensing the fonts to Ascender was two fold: to enable licensing for devices such as “set top boxes, handheld game devices, cell phones, MP3 players, etc.”, and to allow for the legal creation of customized versions.
I suppose today is the ideal day to complain about shelling out for things. :-)
Even so, the fonts alone are worth the full price of a Windows XP license. And most of those web fonts are also included in MacOS, so Mac users have them as well. That leaves the “roll your own” types–Linux & BSD people and the diehard Amiga crackpots. Microsoft, as owner of certain rights to the IP, has the prerogative of determining the price structure as they see fit.
Really, a typographica news item is one of the last places I would expect to see someone complain about having to pay for font licenses. If you find enough value in Microsoft’s IP to use it, pay the license fee. And yes, browsing the web with their fonts consitutes use. The alternative is to develop rival fonts of your own. Somehow the Open Source community almost always* stops short of putting up or shutting up when it comes to font development.
* an exception might be Gentium, though I don’t know if its principal designer considers himself to be part of any open source “movement” or what have you.
I think this is less about having to pay for fonts and more about the widespread availability of half-decent fonts for the web.
Until Microsoft pulled them, web designers could count on having Georgia, Trebuchet MS, and other fonts available as standard on the end-user’s computer. Now, you can’t assume that anymore.
I was responding to statements in Mr. Harnett’s article that only appear when you click the “read the rest” link.
I agree this seems a strange Typographica post. A few obvious issues.
The TrueType �Web fonts� (and here I�m including the old versions of TNR, Arial and Courier New) have shipped with every version of Mac OS and Windows for many years, and continue to be used by others under the terms of the broad Web fonts EULA. I can’t understand why people think they’re going to disappear.
There are only going to be a few regular users who are going to be interested in licensing these � perhaps someone who wants access to the very latest version of a particular font. Other fonts, Nina for example (best font of the new millennium according to ID magazine) have not been available to users, and that was a shame � we got lots of requests for that font.
What Ascender is also offering is these fonts in PostScript Type 1 and OpenType CFF, for most of these fonts for the very first time. I don�t think the price is unreasonable for an official, legal, technically competent, and supported version of these fonts.
That�s on the retail side, but I think where this really becomes exciting is on the custom, OEM and ISV side. Microsoft is not in the custom font business, we make and modify fonts to ship with our products. Ascender can make the special versions designers need. They can make special versions for the thousands of companies that use Verdana or Georgia as part of their corporate identity. They can license custom versions of these fonts to set top box, mobile phone and device makers. They can license special versions of these fonts to software makers, for example a modified or extended version of Tahoma for a products UI.
I also find the OSS references a bit strange. OSS doesn�t seem to have done anything interesting with respect to font development, at least in the west.
Cheers, Si
Bitstream Vera are free. And the opensource community has done some work on them.
(No need to comment about Bitstream Vera Serif beauty…)
But isnt Verdana and Georgia for Mac only installed with Internet Explorer? As that browser since long isnt updated it will probably sooner or later be phased out completely among Mac users (is it even preinstalled on brand new Macs?). Will the free Microsoft web fonts for Mac ‘disappear’ once that happens? (Far from everybody is using Microsoft Office.)
>Will the free Microsoft web fonts for Mac �disappear� once that happens?
Unfortuantely there are confidentiality clauses that prohibit me from talking about any specific agreements between Microsoft and Apple. My answer to this question (when bloggers have raised the issue, and people have asked me directly about it) has always been talk to the Apple PR department.
Apple aside Apple the creator of any device, commercial app or OS can get rights to ship these fonts from Ascender.
>Bitstream Vera are free. And the opensource community has done some work on them.
The Vera project is interesting (even though the results over the past two and a bit years haven’t been) but the restrictions Gnome/Bitstream puts around them, and the fact that the Vera fonts are renamed Prima fonts, minus some of the hints, supports our reasons for not seriously considering something similar. Perhaps someone more familiar with the project can describe what extensions have been rolled back into the official Vera fonts.
Cheers, Si
Not sure how serious this is. A possible problem with GPL fonts?
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/04/17/2118203.shtml?tid=117&tid=185&tid=17
“Not sure how serious this is. A possible problem with GPL fonts?”
Nah, just the usual overblown Slashdot nonsense. Using GPL fonts in a document doesn’t restrict what you do with it any more than using non-free fonts does.
> And yes, browsing the web with their fonts consitutes use.
Does reading a newspaper constitute ‘use’, in this sense, of a typeface? Looks like my typography budget is going to be a little stretched.
Yes, Tom, it does when it’s being rendered on your screen, and you can always read a newspaper site in a substitute font. Of course it probably won’t look as good in a font other than the one intended, and that only reinforces the value of type. It’s time more people realize this.
To make my enquiry clear: does reading a printed newspaper constitute ‘use’, in this sense, of a typeface?
I’m looking forward to the day when the newspaper machine has a coin slot on top for the door mechanism and one on the side to purchase a single-use license to benefit from the typeface design used within.
My local newspaper uses a proprietary face on its masthead (BN Gothic, ShinnType). Fortunately they chose to render it as a JPG in the online version (and as ink on paper in the ink on paper version) so I can still benefit from the design intent. I can only hope that Mr. Shinn recognized that his custom font restoration would end up being distributed in this manner.
Actually, the bitmapped image of the Birmingham News masthead that appears on their website is still the previous (non-font) version which I renovated for print a couple of years ago.
***
Surely the distinction between a piece of SET typography, which does not necessitate the viewer possessing the complete font, and viewing a “live text” web page which does require that, is clear.
The idea that you raised, Dystopos, of publishing being the defining factor, does not take this into account. What makes a font the unique tool that it is, and gives it its value, is that the possessor may use it to make typography.
The case which arises in digital media, where a font’s possession is required merely to read a document, is recognized by different levels of embedding privilege that may be engineered into a font (TrueType or OpenType), and also stipulated in a EULA.
It is greedy to expect that one should be given possession of a font, with all the abilities to set type which that provides, merely to read a document. However, floxy-moxy Microsoft has built this expectation by making fonts embeddable in Word documents, and by distributing the Core Web fonts with IE.
Point taken. (And my apologies for glibness). We agree that not everyone who reads a newspaper will ever need to publish one. The current manner of online publishing distributes powerful tools to individual readers who pay even less than the four bits needed to buy a printed newspaper typeface. (Which, at best, can only be reconfigured into a ransom note).
It seems there is still much to be worked out, however, on the question of how valuable such a tool is to various types of users. Purchase of a cast metal font by a printing press can be recouped over hundreds of large printing jobs while a small-time freelance graphic designer might have to charge the entire cost to one client.
I’ve been wondering about a system where licenses were handled at the printing end of the job. Browsers, RSS aggregators, and consumer printers would still have bundled fonts based on their distribution while commercial printers would require different license scales in order to complete a print order. So, as a designer, I could invest $25 in a new font family for a design, and until somebody took it to a publisher to include in a 50,000 copy print run, it would be a nominal expense. At the point where you’re making real money off the thing, however, the higher-cost license is required. This would encourage small-scale designers to explore the best fonts available at the lay-out stage rather than settle for whatever MS is able to bundle.
If the bundled fonts are removed, people will, I’m afraid, just use whatever is left and the font designers will be left high and dry.
>If the bundled fonts are removed, people will, I�m afraid, just use whatever is left and the font designers will be left high and dry.
I’m not so sure about that. The numbers are so massive that a potential “de-bundling” by the oligarchs would, if even only changing the behavior of a few percentage points of the user base, inject a significant amount of capital into the font market.
Consider that a popular font “sells” in the hundreds, if that, and the standard software and operating systems are numbered by the million.
Anyway, this is moot; Microsoft’s Big Texas Steer will bundle lots of lovely fonts so the public will be more than happy; Quark 7 will launch with a big bundle, I would imagine; most of the important type designers have done work for OEM manufacturers (that’s why they’re important) and are unlikely to bite the hand; and the font market is thriving in its own little way. So nothing’s going to change.
Having a small set of fonts being universally available allows web designers to have a base expectation of what the reader will see. Microsoft’s action has pretty much put paid to that expectation. There are several ramifications from this that I can see:
1. The bar for entry into web design has just been raised to be only those who can afford the fonts.
2. At some point, websites will no longer be able to use those fonts because they cannot or will not license them. The alternative, of course, being free fonts, which in most cases make the designer look like an idiot.
3. If the users cannot afford the license for whatever fonts the designer chose, then that website is effectively rendered null and void.
4. A proliferation of pointless fonts on every hard drive, since every website will require their own licensed fonts.
Some of this is alarmist, I know. But Microsofts action makes them all a possibility, and considering it’s Microsoft, a certainty that they will try.
Well, the fonts are “out there”, and available via eg. http://corefonts.sf.net, which distributes them in accordance with the license terms under which they were previously released.
Um, wasn’t it just a few weeks back that Microsoft announced a whole slew of new system fonts in conjunction with the release of their new OS? Looks like to me Microsoft is looking to phase out the old and setting the stage for their new fonts to become the next internet “standard”.
Albert, your arguments have no basis in reality whatsoever.
>Having a small set of fonts being universally available allows web designers to have a base expectation of what the reader will see. Microsoft�s action has pretty much put paid to that expectation. There are several ramifications from this that I can see:
Can you explain this? Did you read my earlier post? No one is talking about taking the Web core fonts out of popular operating systems, and no one is talking about revoking the web fonts EULA. These fonts, which were only previously available with Mac, Windows and limited non-commercial distribution, will now be available to makers of set top boxes, handheld game devices, cell phones, MP3 players etc., if anything they will be more widely installed on a much wider range of devices making them more useful to Web designers.
>1. The bar for entry into web design has just been raised to be only those who can afford the fonts.
This shows a lack of understanding of the Web fonts initiative. Designers never paid for *these fonts*, but relied on them being installed on end-users machines. If anything the fonts are more widely installed than ever before.
>2. At some point, websites will no longer be able to use those fonts because they cannot or will not license them. The alternative, of course, being free fonts, which in most cases make the designer look like an idiot.
Same point as above.
>3. If the users cannot afford the license for whatever fonts the designer chose, then that website is effectively rendered null and void.
This shows a lack of understanding of how fonts ship with operating systems. Once you include a font, and its used to produce documents you cannot take it away, you can�t even make fixes to the font that involve changing metrics.
>4. A proliferation of pointless fonts on every hard drive, since every website will require their own licensed fonts.
Absolutely false. The Web designer decides which fonts a web page will use, via CSS or font tags. The more fonts on a users system and the more widely installed they are the more choices the Web designer effectively has.
>Some of this is alarmist, I know.
Not alarmist, just wrong.
>But Microsofts action makes them all a possibility, and considering it�s Microsoft, a certainty that they will try.
Read Nick�s points about bundling. If you think Microsoft will alienate millions of customers, and generate thousands of support calls by removing fonts from the OS to generate some royalties you�re completely wrong.
Best regards, Si
For years, the 2002 release of the Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web has been freely available from http://corefonts.sf.net/ (and other sources)
While Microsoft removed those fonts from their own website some time ago, the license agreement that accompanies them allows unlimited distribution without alternation. This means that the availability of the 2002 versions is ensured practically indefinitely. These versions are already very mature and contain large character sets. These fonts can be installed on Mac OS X, Linux, and other systems.
However, since the 2002 release, Microsoft expanded and improved the fonts. Later releases are only bundled with Microsoft products and are now available from Ascender.
If you want the 2002 free versions, grab them from the net. If you want newer or customized versions, buy a Microsoft product or a package from Ascender. What is the fuss all about?
A.
I’ll just add that some font distributors I know have been regularly receiving inquiries for PostScript versions of Tahoma, Verdana, Georgia. The customers were willing to pay for these, but the license agreement never allowed such customizations. Now, the customers can buy such versions from Ascender.
A.
>What is the fuss all about?
I feel people are reading the headline and jumping to conclusions. Is it asking too much for the author of the article to comment on the issues people have raised?
Si
The issue is distribution, not the EULA. No one has ever installed a pirated Verdana (sure, you can find some open source Slashdot geek, but that’s the thin end of the wedge). If MS stops shipping Verdana, it will stop being used by designers, who embraced it because it has very useful characteristics for on-screen use, but, more importantly, is far more attractive and readable than Arial, particularly at small sizes. But if the install base dips to 60-70%, people will go back to trying to figure out how make Arial look nice.
The other option will be Flash, or other technologies for rendering type/content as vector art, which negates the need for a EULA for the consumers.
I don’t accept, intellectually, the requirement that someone browsing to a website have a license of font to view it as the designer intended it. This is inconsistent with paradigm of print publishing. What would be best would be an option in browsers to download fonts from sites, with the tradeoff being they are in an secure directory that the user can’t otherwise access. It could be a cache so it wouldn’t gobble bandwidth over time, but would gradually increase the library of fonts in use. Users could clear the cache periodically, and elect to block the fonts. It would also enable browser to report back install base info for designers, to help them gauge the need for downloads.
First off thanks to Stephen for adding the note to the bottom of the article and updating the headline. Secondly apologies to Albert for the earlier venting. Having thought about this today and after receiving a few off-list notes I have a better understanding of the how any initiative around the Web fonts would be a cause for concern amongst the Web design community.
> Um, wasn�t it just a few weeks back that Microsoft announced a whole slew of new system fonts in conjunction with the release of their new OS?
Brian, I think you’re thinking of the ClearType font collection first announced back at ATypI in September.
> Looks like to me Microsoft is looking to phase out the old and setting the stage for their new fonts to become the next internet �standard�.
It’s close to impossible to phase out a font. The history of Windows (and Mac OS as well?) has been the steady addition of new document, international, special use and show-case fonts. We’ve not removed any font of note from the OS.
No one at MS has promoted the CT fonts as an ‘internet standard’ – although the Poynter article seems to have made this mistake too. The fonts are new document fonts designed with screen reading in mind. Even if broadly distributed it would be many years before they reached an installed base similar to that of the Web fonts. And because they don�t render well at bi-level their use on older systems is limited. Having said that I’m sure designers wll start specifying them as first choice fonts in Web pages ‘Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica’ or similar.
Cheers, Si
So in extremely broad terms, core fonts will still be bundled with forthcoming OSes and browsers, but now there’s an option to purchase more versatile, expanded sets of these fonts (for other uses, like print), or for Mac users to buy “good” versions of Microsoft fonts? (I dare anyone to top that run-on sentence!) Sounds like a pretty OK deal to me. As I read the comments, the facts seem to be getting jumbled. Am I missing something?
My intention was only to point out that this somewhat weakens the purpose of why those fonts were released in the first place. I understand that really, it has no practical effect at this point. I guess I tried to get a bit too clever with the headline. Sorry if it caused any confusion.
Congratulations to those who’ve made it this far in the thread. As others have tried to point out here, this is agreement is all about extending the use of Microsoft’s fonts. Ascender will offer licenses to these fonts to three distinct audiences who may not have these fonts today:
– end users who want the fonts in a different format (such as Type 1 or PostScript OpenType)
– enterprises who want the fonts for their non-Windows platforms
– software & hardware developers who want the fonts for their products
Ascender will also be able to modify the fonts for particular customer needs, and make enhancements as appropriate. Up to this point if you wanted a legal copy of these fonts in Type 1 format, of if you wanted to bundle these fonts with your product you were out of luck.
Thus this announcement is good news for web designers who have come to rely on their users having these fonts, as we will be enabling their use on even more devices than in the past.
Webfonts and Tiger…
http://whatdoiknow.org/archives/002208.shtml
Wonder why this didn’t make the top 200 features list for Tiger.
Cheers, Si
Link via Joe Clark.
If I read a printed newspaper, I get the “use” of the font that the paper is typeset in. Anyone can read that newspaper and thus benefit from the font. The newspaper publisher may well have paid an enormous sum of money for that font, but I as the end user (the reader) do not have to pay for it directly. With this change of policy on Microsoft’s part, the costs are being switched from the producer to the consumer. It doesn’t cost me as a website designer a penny to type the name of whatever font my little heart desires into my CSS, but it costs the end user, the person who is just trying to read the website, the full purchase price of that font in order to view my site.
I see this as a very cynical move on Microsoft’s part to make the Web a Windows-only zone: they made these fonts available to all users for years, encouraging everyone to use them for Web design, and they are now requiring non-Windows end users to pay hundreds of dollars for them. Since nobody in their right mind is going to pay for, say, Verdana, just so they can see someone else’s website looking better than it does in their system’s default sans-serif, the non-Windows platforms will have a lower-quality browsing experience. And I think that’s exactly the purpose. Instead of competing by making a better mousetrap, the’re competing by sabotaging rivals.
The vast majority of website designers (we’re talking the same people who don’t understand about ALT and TITLE tags) are not going to remember to list an alternate freely-available font in their CSS … or, worse, in whatever deprecated crud FrontPage spews. After all, they know everyone uses Windows. And as a result, the Web will be at its best only for people who do use Windows.
Do you Mac people really think you won’t be next in the line of fire once Microsoft doesn’t need your platform to preserve the illusion of competition any more? Open your eyes and see this for what it is.
What other platforms are you talking about?
Windows ships the fonts, Mac OS ships the fonts, Linux users have access to them.
Si
Amiga!?
Si