Type Boom
Right now, the market for quality typefaces is limited to people who send expensive print jobs to expensive printers to make thousands of copies of a book, magazine, or brochure. Everyone else gets Times New Roman, Arial, or Verdana.
We're about to see a boom in book publishing that will come from on-demand printing. When more people are able to publish books, they will have use for quality fonts. As long as the fonts can be embedded in the pdf file sent to the printer, the market for fonts will grow.
But that's nothing compared to the web. The ability to use fonts on the web will create an explosion in demand. We need the technology to be included in browsers, and we need higher resolution displays. The potential number of buyers of quality type will go from some tens of thousands to hundreds of millions – three or four orders of magnitude.
Resolution
The higher resolution means that each character can use more pixels. If you only have eleven pixels (high) to work with, it's hard to get quality type. If you have twenty pixels and anti-aliasing, you've got a new ballgame. You can use Sabon, and I can use Mendoza. Neither will look as good on the screen as they do from a 1200 dpi laser printer, but they'll be good enough to be interesting.
Higher resolution is already available. Memory prices are low, so we can afford lots of memory on our video boards. Then you just need to pick the highest possible setting for your monitor.
My 19-inch monitors will handle 1600x1200, at least, and even higher. At that setting, eleven point text (11 points at 72 points per actual inch on the screen) gets 17 pixels in height. That's almost enough. It probably would be enough, for me.
My monitor also allows me to shrink the size of the viewable area. I can make the height of the display as small as 7.5 inches. At 1200 pixels, that makes for 24 pixels vertical to display 11 point text. I suspect this is already good enough for quality type, if you are willing to give up a large portion of the monitor for it. Compared to the Macintosh default setting of 72 pixels per inch, this yields 160 pixels per inch. Whether existing operating systems and applications will adjust to this setting is a pretty good question. Internet Explorer and Mozilla/Netscape both do.
Obviously if someone specifies 11 pixel text on their web page it will be very small: 5 points.
IBM promises to deliver monitors that can display more pixels. Microsoft ClearType will improve the apparent resolution of LCD monitors. (The MS “invention” was used in the 1970s, by the way.)
Embedded fonts
What about the typeface makers and sellers? They need to realize that they'll make a lot more money when the market expands ten or a hundred-fold – even though more people will have – and even use – their fonts without paying. People who don't pay are just free advertising.
The web is currently trapped in Microsoft land for typefaces. If you use any other typeface, people won't have it. If you use a Microsoft typeface, only Microsoft customers can see it. Bad news all around.
The way out is to let webpages download fonts. The good news is that “digital rights management” is uniquely easy on the web: Any font in use can be found through a search engine. Add in a verifiable code for who created the web font file, and then you know whether it's paid for or not. Or skip the code bit, and just compare the database of strokes.
This means we'll be able to sell a typeface once to a designer, and also get money from the designer's customer websites that use it. This is doubly good news. Up until now, you sell the typeface once, and you get nothing more, no matter how much it is used.
But how do you keep people from downloading a font and using it locally? The answer to that is that there will be “cheaters”. Someone could download a million typefaces from the web, and convert them to a format they can use in Quark Express. It doesn't matter. If anything, such enthusiasm will lead to expanding the market. People like that are free advertising.
Not paying for fonts isn't anything new, of course. Now someone can buy or find a typeface and sell it on a CD with hundreds of other fonts.
In fact, anyone using quality fonts will spend more in time fiddling with them than they paid for the right to use them. In fact, we're probably better off if it's easy to try out fonts, as long as it's easy to buy them when you decide to use them. These websites where you can preview bitmapped characters are a step in the right direction, but it's still not as good as trying the font out in your own software.
Finally, the point is that people are happy to pay for quality, and most organizations and most people aren't going to cheat much. If CNN uses your fonts, they're going to pay for it. Most designers who make a living at it are going to pay for fonts they use, too. It's much better to pay than to risk bad publicity.
Basically, we're in for a boom. The screen resolution is just about good enough now. It will be good enough, soon. The next thing is for the type industry to get out of the way – stop worrrying about each unpaid installation of a font – and let the market explode.
What if you could sell a thousand times as many fonts as you do now, but you knew that a hundred times as many people would use your fonts without paying?
Ka-ching!
Copyright © 1998-2002 J. R. Boynton