Font cost

Question

Fonts

Good day!

Why is the cost of fonts that you can buy on the Internet so high (I have seen fonts for several hundred euros). I have a rather vague idea about the process of creating fonts, so I do not quite understand what causes such prices.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Each letter of the font is drawn separately, let's calculate:
The Latin alphabet is 26 letters
+ capital letters are 26 more
+ there are ~ 80 additional characters of the Latin alphabet (Latin is used not only in English), but we will assume that we do not need all of them and take for simplicity accounts 18
+ 10 digits from 0 to 9
+ special characters is about 20
Total: 26+26+18+10+20=100 independent characters for which you still need bold, italic and italic (yes, yes, this is not the same as italic, I recently found out myself)
I am a programmer / layout designer and perhaps somewhere I made a mistake in the calculations, but when I asked myself a similar question, I answered it myself like this, drawing 400 characters is not such an easy job as it might seem at first glance.

Answer 2

A few hundred euros is not the limit.
Just try to imagine how long it takes to draw all the letters (both large and small, and often in several languages) and symbols that will be designed in the same style.
This is not a logo to draw, which often also costs several hundred euros.

Answer 3

100 euros is 4 hours of work, where did you see that it is expensive? If it's expensive, then draw your own font in 4 hours.

Answer 4

It is not enough to draw letters, they must be kept in the same style. It is necessary to make the font readable at different sizes. You need to know the features of each letter and the relationship between the elements of these letters.
Read, for example, "The Book of Letters" or "Live Typography" and try to understand and remember all this. Maybe then it will become clearer.

Answer 5

In addition to the number of characters, there is also such a thing as "kerning". It is necessary to determine the mass of kerning pairs, and in most cases this is done by eye. Another font is not just a set of pictures, it is a program. Especially OTF fonts.
That is, drawing is about 1/5 of the total amount of work.
There are also bold styles, italics, bold italics. And they often have to be combined with each other. That is, hundreds of thousands of combinations must be brought to harmony.
Here is such a gesture. The work actually takes even years in some cases, and not the work of one person, but sometimes several.
Well, read how Paratype made PT Sans/Serif fonts and so on. How much analytical work was done there, and how much time was spent on the same hinting.