Edit: Why was this down-voted? Is this not a legitimate concern? It is worth mentioning that I remap my fonts to help my dyslexic brain keep track of the baseline.
Edit2: It is also worth noting that this font does degrade quite gracefully and my problem lies more with the paradigm than this particular font.
When did we lose our interest in and support for hacking ?
It doesn't have to be "practical" nor "broadly applicable" to remain interesting and perhaps even a bit inspiring. And, as often as not, it's the thought of "What happens when I mash these things together?" that produces some real innovation.
As a community, we should continue to support such exploration.
People here do startups and businesses, but the community was never solely, nor perhaps even primarily, about that. Which comes first, the hack or the business?
(I see that they are working on a web version, and regarding that I have to say I agree.)
Not only does it create accessibility and cross-platform issues but there are already dozens of other and cheaper ways to create nice looking graphs.
>Why do people still insist on doing this?
And it's also nice to be able to change the colour of your monochrome vector graphics.
This isn't just how this graphing font works; it's how virtually all professional typefaces work.
Firefox has supported this since version 4, and but until recently it was the only browser do so. Now Microsoft has joined the party by announcing OpenType support in Internet Explorer 10, along with Chrome on Windows (not Mac yet).
(per http://blog.fontdeck.com/post/15777165734/opentype-1 with Chrome 16+ mentioned for Windows support. I haven't verified this.)
That said, the pricing is absurd. There are numerous data analysis and graphing programs that produce better looking, more customizable charts and graphs with a simpler UI, most of which cost significantly less than $129 despite being much more powerful.
This isn't a typical font, however. This is a font that serves a single specialized purpose, which is better served by existing non-font tools that are also cheaper. An exceptionally difficult sales proposition if one wants to get beyond font geeks who buy it simply because it's cool (not that there's anything wrong with that; I certainly considered buying it simply because it was a cool hack).
The value of a product isn't based on what it is, it's based on how it's used.
The examples on the website don't necessarily do the tool justice, but it produces really beautiful output if you take the time to learn to use it, produces good output even if you don't, scales well to huge data sets, and the guy who writes it is incredibly sensitive to user feedback; when I've requested features, they've usually been available in a new beta inside of two days.
When you do that, and select Chartwell as the font, you get a working font - in Illustrator, or any font-display program that supports setting the Text style for .ttf fonts ..