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Comment by fluoridation | Hacker News Reader

>It's something you'll be looking at for perhaps 8 hours a day for years. If you actually use it, a font is easily worth that much

I mean, what are you comparing against? Rendering text in the null font? Sure, if that's really all you have then I guess spend $250 on an actual font, but even VGA is perfectly serviceable for a lot of tasks, and I'm not sure this font is $250 better than VGA, let alone something like DejaVu or what have you.

>creating fonts isn't free

At this point we should ask if it was necessary to create another font in the first place.

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> I mean, what are you comparing against? Rendering text in the null font?

No, I'm comparing against "whatever the default is". It's the same with chairs or beds. You can get "something to sit on" or "something to lay on" for $0 or close to it. But I will gladly pay a premium for the same reason - I spend 8+ hours a day in a chair, and 8+ hours a day in bed, so I don't even blink at paying any price to improve my daily QOL for years to come. Even if it's only by a little bit, a little bit of QOL over thousands of hours is an investment in your own happiness.

> At this point we should ask if it was necessary to create another font in the first place.

There's plenty of room for more fonts to exist. I have yet to find a monospaced coding font I like with Japanese support, and would gladly pay $250 if I found one.

Eh. To each his own. If it's about making improvements, I'm sure I could think of something to spend $250 on that would be more effective than a font, speaking for myself. There is such a thing as good enough, for me.

The comparison doesn't add up, frankly. There are number of free fonts which work awesome for coding. In your terms, it's like I have an excellent chair already, not just "something to sit on".

That's a bit of a false comparison - does this font significantly improve your quality of life comparably to a cheaper/open source font? Is this font really that much better than Jetbrains mono?

Why not pay $10,000 for a font if you are spending 8 hours a day looking at text? Probably because that's a obscene price to pay for a font.

I think the problem is that competition in this area is fierce, so as soon as I see a font like this with such an expensive personal use license - my first thought is - is this really going to be a unique experience compared to the quality of open source fonts?

Yes - fonts arent free - and obviously they're going for a market that will want to spend $250 on a personal font - but if so, I don't think the marketing works for achieving this

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