Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/03/29
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]> Do you remember the time before Apple came out with True Type fonts? Do you > remember what Adobe charged for their fonts? Obscene. There has never been > a time when Adobe has not attempted to rip the entrails out of its customer base. > Their business model seems to be that of hyenas after dark. If Adobe's business model were as evil as you say, they would not still be in business. They don't have a monopoly on anything, and never have. If their products didn't give value for money, people wouldn't buy them. If you can solve your problem with cheap fonts, then do it. If you need professional-grade fonts, they are no more expensive from Adobe than from anybody else. At the time that TrueType came out, buying a font from Adobe was about half the price of buying it retail from Adobe's suppliers. TrueType came from Microsoft, not Apple. It was invented as a way of trying to crack Apple's lock on the graphic arts industry. It didn't work. The process by which it came full-circle back to Apple is boring. TrueType is a competitor for Type I; they are both schemes for representing fonts as polynomials. The last time I had access to Adobe's cost data for fonts was about 10 years ago, but this is probably during the time you refer to. At that time my brother was also in the font business, selling fonts for NeXT computers, so I had two data points. The cost to Adobe and to my brother of the fonts, from the companies that owned them (Mergenthaler, Hell, ITC, and so forth) was about 2/3 of the retail price of the fonts. I don't think Adobe made any profit at all on fonts at that time, and I'm quite certain that my brother didn't. By the time you pay for order-taking, shipping, catalog printing, customer service, rent, and so forth, there just wasn't any actual profit left. Price is not the same thing as profit. The money in fonts, back then, was not being made by Adobe, it was being made by the companies that owned the fonts. What has happened since then is that the world has decided it doesn't mind ugly fonts, and that Microsoft paid some very good font designers to produce some very good fonts (e.g. Verdana) and put them into the public domain. This doesn't compete with Adobe, it compete's with Adobe's suppliers. But today, if you want to buy a professional font, TrueType and Type I are about the same price, and most of that money goes to the owner of the font and not to the packager. Adobe actually reduced the market price of high-end fonts. Since you seem to hate Adobe so much, you probably won't believe me, but it's quite true. If you are doing top-of-the-line typography, such as for a corporate annual report, you actually want a large number of fonts with the same name, but with subtly different sizes and shapes and weights. In the high-end typographic world, you can't get away with optical scaling over a very wide range, because the letterforms have to change as the size changes. A 5-point lowercase "a" is designed quite differently from a 32-point lowercase "a". Until Adobe invented Multiple Master fonts, typographers had to buy 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 variations of the same font, giving Mergenthaler or Hell 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 times as much money. Now they can (and do) buy a single Multiple Master version and have much better control over the resulting typography. I know and work with a lot of people who do high-end type design for a living, and have done it for many years. Most have been doing it since before Adobe was founded. I don't think I could find a single one of them who think that Adobe overcharges for anything. Except for them hating InDesign (they mostly use Quark) I think all of them would agree that Adobe has made their cost of doing business much lower. - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html