I chose a very extreme example, but it's still just a stylized E, used for text. My word processor also has lots of different E's to choose from, all stylized differently. Where do you draw the line? Serifs? Embossing? Floral motifs? I designed an E. Which side of the line do it belong? 

Ah, so you're just saying words recreationally. [There's glory for you.](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12/12-h/12-h.htm#%3A%7E%3Atext=When I use a word) Fonts are protected works and you seem to understand why - but dismissively pretend an artsy font would be exceptional and distinct, instead of being as protected as any other illustration of the alphabet. None of them somehow own... the alphabet. Just the illustrations. Like any illustration. Even little Billy's shitty Sonic OC has some copyright protections. He can't slap his drawing of Blonic into a video game, but *neither can Sega.* Consider [Futura.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futura_(typeface)) You have seen this font a million times and probably thought about it precisely never. It's aggressively plain. But its development is a microcosm of early 20th-century art history, philosophy, and politics, to the point it was treated as degenerate by the actual goddamn Nazis, and then later adopted by them anyway. These boring-ass letters were *innovative.* This one sans-serif font has a five thousand word Wikipedia article. That's not a complicated joke, and it's only partially ingroup fart-sniffing. This is an element of culture you interact with every goddamn day. You're doing it right now. Immense work has gone into designing and rendering whichever generic sans-serif you're reading this in. Yet even if it was still mono-spaced Codepage 437 in green on black, somebody had to draw all those pixels. Somebody decided it needed not one but two smiley faces. And it's protected to the same extent as the BIOS code, one ROM chip over, for all the same reasons. It is an artifact of human labor, under practical constraints, for specific expressive purposes. It can't not be. I've done some Game Boy games. One has a custom font. I just winged it. It's not important. But why would you expect those graphics to be any less protected than all the other sprites I drew?

Just because a category is fuzzy doesn't make it invalid. That's whynwe have laws to force standardized definitions of various concepts. You arguing against whatever definition I proposed would indict only that definition, and not the broader concept that there is an important line to begin with.

Monotype may as well be the mafia. My wife's work had to deal with those assholes, too, after they bought the rights to some font. They're just shaking companies down for cash.

So, as far as I can tell, your arguments are that that a normal font is nothing more than the alphabet, therefore there's no art in it, and therefore the creator shouldn't have any claim to it. My argument is that every detail is an artistic choice, and that simply making it look aesthetically pleasing or distinctive is art. If fonts weren't art, why would people even bother with different looking fonts? But regardless of the art question, if the creator can't license their fonts, it would mean that they get no compensation for when some company uses their work.

> It’s also worth noting that in the case of games in Japanese, it’s not so easy for developers to find alternatives. While games using English can rely on system UI fonts, cheap commercial fonts or open-source options, the sheer number of characters used in Japanese means high-quality fonts are extremely difficult and expensive to make, so few affordable alternatives are available. There's already a decent selection of high quality, freely available Japanese fonts here: https://fonts.google.com/?lang=ja_Jpan

Excellent time for the Japanese to drop ideogram/logogram system and have an alphabet like a functional language.

You know what? You are right. That Wikipedia article was a fascinating read. I recant my previous statements uniquivocally, sincerely and unironically. Thank you for the humbling lesson on what it's like to be on the left side of the Dunning-Krueger curve. I'm an ignorant fuck.

So design a couple fonts. It ain't rocket science.

So design a couple fonts. It ain't rocket science.

1) that's literally one of the most bigoted comments I've ever seen in the fediverse 2) your comment is in English, a language so non-functional it's the only one that had to have spelling bees to get kids to learn its asinine rules

You know what? You are right. That Wikipedia article was a fascinating read. I recant my previous statements uniquivocally, sincerely and unironically. Thank you for the humbling lesson on what it's like to be on the left side of the Dunning-Krueger curve. I'm an ignorant fuck.

Japanese fonts are much harder to make than English fonts. Thousands of characters and all that.

Uhh... Basically every language I can think of have had some form of childhood activity that pushed learning it's asinine rules at some point in it's history. Cause fun fact. Literally every language that has ever existed is batshit crazy, makes no sense and might as well be unhinged nonsense. That's not a monopoly English has. Not by a fucking long shot. That guy's comment is racist as fuck tho

This is not what I expected when I clicked "show more replies."

Excellent time for Japanese devs to collectively develop some open-source fonts. Many hands make light work.

Admittedly I'm not sure if it works for Japanese, but English has online tools you can use to print out a sheet to write out every character and scan to turn into a font file. Would be surprising if it didn't exist for Japanese. So ultimately you probably just need someone with neat handwriting.