Font Deal!

@jaremelz There are more than a few which cost much, much more.

@Pavlov As someone who's never needed to know their cost, I'm just a bit floored by that.

@jaremelz Amen Sister!

@jaremelz Fonts for video can break the bank. JHA Bodoni Ritalic and is available on MyFonts for an even $5,000. TEFF Lexicon used to cost more than that. Many font "foundries" price their stuff way above the average $25-$40USD / font - if it adds value, and you have to have it, it is occasionally worth it.

@Pavlov My husband has informed me of the cost of our font collection (he's a font whore from way back).
I immediately inquired about the font black market.

@jaremelz Good typeface design is art. Making a good font family is art as well as grueling craftspersonship. One doesn't start with their standard weight and just automagically shrink it for lights and fatten it for bolds; everything shrinks and fattens in its own way. Italics are not merely tilted normal type, they're their own design. Characters are paired off and given adjustments for how they sit next to each other - both kerning (spacing) and ligatures (an actual design for a character pair, like how the 'i' often drops its dot in the pair 'fi'). Characters are given adjustments for how they render at different sizes, because just shrinking and growing something often makes it look different than how we perceive it would look if it had merely shrunk or grown. Designing as many lovely characters as a typical font contains, and then granting someone a license to use them as they see fit should already be comparable to pricing of stock photos or illustration… but soooo much work goes into a well-designed font.

On the other hand, any time anyone uses Comic Sans, they should have to pay everyone who will ever look at it.

@jaremelz Frankly, even at $490 the bundle is a good price. I paid $180 for 3 weighs of Avenir with corresponding italics, and that was bundle pricing. Along with what @brhfl explained, true professional fonts come with a lot more features that make them useful for typesetting than what comes in the fonts pre-installed on the computer. Add on that these fonts have commercial value for branding and it makes sense that licensing a font, with its impact on the look for a company, book, or product would come with a cost just like licensing a song for a commercial or movie (and there are different costs for fonts depending on how you will use them).
As for the black market, fonts are licensed like software (or music or images), so it can probably be downloaded someplace, but that of course opens you up to legal liabilities. I was at a large company that faced some serious repercussions from Adobe, who were prepared to mention the problem to their friends at Microsoft and Apple as well; that was not a fun time. We were pretty good at my branch, but apparently at other offices piracy was rampant. I heard they even found a copy of Photoshop on a computer used for a cash register in a company cafeteria. A number of people were fired over that; the liability to Adobe alone was in the millions. If you're caught, it generally proves to be a lot cheaper to have been legitimate all along and be a little more judicious with who needs what anyway. Licensing is a question I ask about companies on job interviews now.

@Thumperchick Oooh, thanks TC. This is right up my alley, but I actually have most of the fonts in this collection already. Thanks for thinking of me, though.

@dashcloud I remember being shipped a font collection which spanned multiple 5.25 floppy.

@Pavlov Wow!

@dashcloud For anyone interested, there's a bunch of them on the Internet Archive's site.

@Pavlov Hell, I just remember 5.25 Discs, and computers with no hard drive

very similar to our first computer

Ever have one of these?

@Foxborn Yessss, the eight-incher!

@Pavlov Ah, the 5.25" disks, the real floppies. It never really made sense to me to call a 3.5" disk a floppy since it was pretty rigid.

@Foxborn I heard of the 8" disks but never used one myself. When I was in elementary school a friend's dad came in and showed us a disk he had designed for 3M. It was huge, at least 12", and held a lot more than any other floppy disk, but it never got going because the trend was toward smaller, not bigger.

@jqubed @Foxborn I found one of these in the woods once, the ugly(er) bastard cousin of the Zip Disk…

…never did find a drive to read it, though…

@brhfl Zip Disk... remember the "click of death"?

@dashcloud like this? Says it requires Windows 3.1. A bit ashamed to admit I found this actual box in a stack of Smithsonian-grade software in the basement.

@brhfl Is that the disk that could be read in a drive that could read both this high-capacity disk and regular 3.5" floppies? I never saw one in person.

@RedOak I never got the click myself, fortunately, but I heard about it.

@RedOak Yep! In case you didn't know, the Internet Archive would love to have any or all of your Smithsonian-grade software- either physically, or as uploads+box/CD scans.

@brhfl @jqubed Here's a video on the Bernoulli drive:

@dashcloud hmmm. A couple years ago I threw out a ton of DOS era software and manuals, including original IBM PC stuff. Finally convinced myself I was not the Smithsonian - partially. It's a disease. ;-)

@jqubed The disk you're thinking of is the 3M LS-120/240… those were actually pretty nice at the time, but they came after the Zip disk had already become an established standard. The image I put up is the Bernoulli disk @dashcloud posted a video about, big beast of a thing Iomega did before Zip.

@dashcloud Do you have a link of where to submit titles that one has available to see if they would like them?

@bdb If you're going do scans & uploads, just check archive.org for your title- if it's not there, feel free to upload it. If you're holding onto a collection of physical items, get in touch with Jason Scott- jason @ textfiles.com. He's the best person to talk to about this.

@cranky1950 I'd say that depends on your circumstance. For a personal page or small venture you're just starting out with, yeah, stick with inexpensive/free fonts. If you're dealing with an enterprise that has specific branding guidelines, then you should probably stick with the specified font; they can probably afford the pay-as-you-go model anyway.

@jqubed yeah until a site gets hit with a DOS and the bill from font shop comes in.

@cranky1950 I don't think there's much option for those brand name fonts. That seems to be how Monotype has chosen to do business. It's a good consideration if you're coming up with brand guidelines for an organization: find a font with web licensing that has a one-time fee.