I recently got in contact with a designer that can help me add Cyrillic to my fonts (I haven't dared so far to do it myself since I have no knowledge of the cyrillic alphabet). These are all existing typefaces currently on sale, so I'm confused as to how to release the Cyrillic. I have several options:
- Just add the Cyrillic to the current font, and sell at the same price, offering more value for the money (and attracting a bigger market)
- Release the complete font (Latin + Cyrillic) as a new family ("Pro"?), for a higher price
- Release a Cyrillic only version (skeptical about this)
Anyone done a similar thing? Any insight or recommendations?
Comments
Why would you offer cyrillic for a higher price? A pro? You even dont know cyrillic alphabet.
Most countries that use cyrillic are relatively poor and not interested in spending money on fonts. You propably won't notice any profits from adding cyrillic script.
But nonetheless it is so fun. You should try it!
But you're probably right, cyrillic support will probably not make people willing to pay more. They'll just move on to the next font.
- the pro version and the latin-only version sell quite good.
- the cyrillic-only version sells quite bad. Even greek-only gets licenced more often.
- pro version including cyrilic was a dealmaker for some custom licence deals with bigger companies.
I agree with James about the "Pro" term. That was only relevant two decades ago during the transition from classic PostScript to OpenType. Even 10 years ago, the term had already become ludicrous.
The Pro label is not optimal, but we didn’t find a better name to signify the difference between our normal standard character set and the one included in Pro. We also mention Cyrillic in the shop to clarify things. Adding Cyrillic Extended is quite a lot of work for us, and I doubt the sales for supporting Abkhaz or such will ever outweigh the cost of supporting the language, but that’s okay. Pro is about 350 more characters compared to our usual 650. GT Eesti Pro, our next release, currently has 999 glyphs.
Adding Cyrillic offers other benefits like showing what you’re capable of for custom typefaces, and as noted, Cyrillic support can be quite important for larger customers.
I don’t think it’s ludicrous, as I still haven’t gotten around to upgrading all my older fonts!
My present best-seller is Brown Gothic, published in 1999, and its’s still in the classic PostScript and TrueType formats, with basic Western encoding and no features. People nonetheless find it useful.
When I release the upgrade, very soon, it will be “Pro”, which will clarify the situation for licence holders, who may or may not want to upgrade (they will get a special offer).
This strategy worked very well for my 2012 upgrade of Bodoni Egyptian (also from around 1999).
I'm leaning towards just adding it to the current family, and hoping increased value=more sales.
All that’s required is to remove the old fonts, install the new, and change the font names in live documents.
Isn’t it more confusing for businesses to have different versions of a font, with the same name, in their documents and workflow?