FEW people use more than a couple of the hundreds of typefaces that come installed on their computers. Fewer still realise that the revenues from licensing those letters go to some of the media industry’s great survivors. The firms that design, own and sell fonts have lived through successive waves of technological change, first as computerised printing replaced metal type and then when much reading moved to screens. Now websites and apps are shaking up their business once more.Monotype, an American firm founded in 1887, is the industry’s biggest. Its customers, who are mostly technology companies and designers of printed material and websites, pick from a catalogue of 18,000 fonts, which include classics such as Arial, Times New Roman and Helvetica as well as more unusual ones such as Officina (which we use in the captions and on the contents pages of our newspaper). In its early days it sold ingenious machines that enabled Edwardian printers to cast lines of type in seconds; now, as well as the right to use its fonts, it sells software that renders text on screen. That makes it both supplier and competitor to...
from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1rDecvw
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