The same page that let’s you download Merriweather also lets you donate. Donations will be used to improve Merriweather and the Google font Directory.
You may also commission specific features to be added to the free version of Merriweather.
For example:
- If I have donations of $1,500.00 USD then I will add small caps to the regular weight and regular style of Merriweather. That’s one extra font.
- For $4,000.00 USD I will make small caps for all the weights of the upright serif design. That is small caps for Serif Light, Serif Regular, Serif Bold, and Serif Heavy. This is a total of four fonts.
- And for $6,000.00 USD I will add them to all weights of the serif and the sans serif version. That is small caps for Serif Light, Serif Regular, Serif Bold, Serif Heavy, Sans Light, Sans Regular, Sans Bold, and Sans Heavy. That is eight fonts.
This leaves out the italics for now. I suspect this fine because the use of italic small caps will be infrequent.
…Or maybe you want an extra heavy version.
Just let me know and I’ll give you a quote. We can use pay pal or we could even create a kickstarter fund!
The main thing is to let me know what you would like.
Thanks!
Merriweather Font 
Hey,
I can’t seem to find any donation option on the page you’ve linked to, nor on the rest of the Google Web Fonts site for that matter. Any other suggestions?
I need to update this post because google has closed that option. If I want to continue accepting donations I will need to open a new venue for it. If you did donate, what features would you be most wanting to see added?
Thanks! My paypal account is now under the email address sorkineben@gmail.com
OK, thanks for clearing that up! As far as requests go, I think you’re on the right track 🙂
Seconded…if you give us a Paypal address or what not, I can make a very small modest donation to encourage you to continue working on the delta hinting.
Thanks! My paypal account is under the email address sorkineben@gmail.com. Whatever you can contribute is much appreciated. I have been paying for hinting classes to get this really right for the last month. It is looking very promising now. Q: I suspect that you only care about Greyscale and Cleartype rendering not necessarily black and white. But is that correct?
Using Firefox or Chrome on my desk PC, the Merriweather font looks very chunky.
With IE on my desk PC, and with any browser on any other computer I have seen, it looks ok. Any thoughts? I can send screen shots if it helps.
This is because the version of the Firefox and Chrome you have now don’t use the new rendering engine IE is using. The other reason for trouble is that Merriweather is Reaching its final stages and does not have what is called “hinting” yet. Happily Firefox and Chrome are likely to get better rendering soon and Merriweather is about to get hinting so your experience with Merriweather should improve quite a bit in the next 4-6 months.
I am expecting that the new hinting that is coming will fix this. I’ll be posting about this over the next week and showing previews.
What exactly do you mean when you say ‘hinting classes’ 🙂
P.S.: Merriweather is a beauty, I will make my contribution soon congratulations!
I mean that I was learning how to use the Microsoft software VTT. Both Fontlab and VTT are publicly available tools to that allow you manually hint TrueType and TrueType flavored Opentype fonts to display well in windows. I chose to learn VTT because the software gives you a more hinting options and more options to preview the results you can expect after hinting.
Hi Eben,
I’ve started using Merriweather for a new start-up company with a strongly screen-based product. Everyone’s very happy with it so far. We’re planning to give you a donation for its further development soon (as soon as money starts coming in!). In the meantime, a question: Have you given any consideration to print equivalents or a complementary print face? I ask this as we have a need now to produce some documentation that will be printed. I was planning a trawl through my fonts today to see what I could find that might work and then I thought, maybe Eben’s already been through that loop, best ask!
Congratulations on a lovely well-mannered font!
Wendy
Thanks for your interest! The print version is a few months away in part because the design has many many new OpenType features. I expect to offer quite a few more weights and contrasts and perhaps optical sizes as well. So to serve you best it might be a good idea to provide you with a kerned version of the publicly available design before the complete print specific design is available. What do you think? Will you be using the font in InDesign for the print work? If you did use it when would you need this version?
Three questions. First, you say you plan support for Cyrillic, Arabic, and Greek. Will these be only in the commercial versions of the fonts? Second, how much funding would you need to free the commercial versions of the fonts?
Third, could you please make Merriweather’s question mark more upright? In body text I find it very distracting and disruptive of the text’s flow.
About the Question mark – maybe. Some people seem to really like it. But I aught to make a survey or something.
About the Cyrillic Greek and Arabic etc. It seems like Merriweather could have a nice commercial future however I am not wedded to the idea that these should be commercial or Libre. The question is really just one of what people want to fund. Doing all of what I want to do would take years. I need to decide how long it I think it will really be and then I need to decide I think is fair to be paid for the time. The same holds true for print specific versions.
I’ll try to work out the answer to these questions as soon as I can.
What do you think would be reasonable or fair? Why?
Just an opinion of mine, but I think making fonts proprietary is the wrong idea. I think all fonts should be free software, and their price should be reasonable: Fontsmith charges 70 pounds (about $110 US) for one personal-use license of one weight. And their EULA scares me, as do most others. I purchased a copy, but no longer use it because I prefer free software.
A good, sensible price would be $20, either per style or per family. But I’m not the one trying to make a living from fonts. If you do want to make them all free software, you should charge a very high price, as your buyers will be able to give it for others.
I am not aware of a foundry that has a made a Libre font where they also charge a licensing fee for that same font. Are you aware of one? I am in some doubt as to the viability of the model you propose but perhaps I am wrong. It is certainly interesting if for no other reason than for its sheer novelty.
In some ways what I am and have been proposing is just a variation on your idea – rather than hoping to be paid to do the work over time that the project should be paid for ahead of time – or in stages as it is completed which is what Red Hat, Google or other software companies seem to do.
IN the model you are thinking of who would pay for the font at this high price? What would be the motivation to do so?
I assume that in addition to saying “I think all fonts should be free software” you might also say “I think all software should be free software” – correct?
I’m not aware of one, so why not be the first? I think it would be a good model. You could even say something like “Mirrors offering this font may be virus-infected! Only buy Sorkin Type fonts from this site!” You don’t have to call it a “licensing fee”; it could also be a distribution fee for the purpose of keeping your website running.
I think you’d be surprised at who might pay a high price for fonts. Just look at the prices for the popular font FF Meta. 5 licenses cost you $1599, but you can see it everywhere if you look because it’s such good quality – just like Sorkin Type’s fonts from what I’m seeing in the previews. I can’t wait to use them and hope they become available soon. It’s bad enough that most fonts aren’t free software, but when for the price of a new way to see the alphabet you could buy a cheap car…
And yes, I do believe that all software should be free software, so that all users can be free.
Hi Eben,
I’ve been using Merriweather for an online newspaper. Actually Merriweather saved my newspaper. Some said it was more legible than Helvetica! And, this is true, they printed out Merriweather and it’s good-looking! The only thing is, they want an extra light headline but I don’t have one and will not have one because it isn’t free.
Maybe I could donate sometime in the future.
Thank you for that well-made font!
Ian Raphael Lopez
P.S. and mabe you could do a slab -serif version 😀
What newspaper is that? What URL? I am curious to see where you might use an extra light headline. Can you use Merriweather Sans for the headline?
Sir, the newspaper is a free PDF and I publish it through facebook.
Sir we have decided not to use any very light version because it would look like scribbles (we tested TheSerif extralight)
Greetings from Argentina! I like very match your font! (www.koch.com.ar)
How I could donate? I would like the numbers in non-elzevirian.
Nice site!
I think you mean what we call “lining numbers” in the terminology of English typography. They are the ones that are all at the height of capital letters. Am I correct?
My question would be do you want tabular (equal width) numbers or proportional (different widths) tabular numbers?
I have been developing both of these over 8 kinds of numbers for the last week including ones for fractions, superiors and inferiors. There will be web specific and print editions of this new expanded font when it becomes available in the next 2-3 months. It will be a commercially licensable version of Merriweather.
I’ll post images of these features and other improvements coming to the free soon.
Is there an alternate question mark by any chance?
The new version that is coming has one that is softer. What is the context? Do you just want the Google one to be different or do you need a custom version?
There is a bug in the font Merriweather: In theCyrillic Capital Letter Yeru “Ы” (U+042B) – IT IS DEPLOYED ON THE OTHER SIDE!
Capital cyrillic letter Ы (cyrillic capital letter yeru, Ы) has an incorrect order of the elements. Small letter is right.
On Google fonts service there is wrong symbol in cyrillic extension – Ы
If you decide to do a Kickstarter, I can make a modest donation. Small caps in regular, bold, & heavy weights are my most desired new feature. Tabular lining figures would be right after that. The proportional lining figures look great, by the way — I just implemented them in my test site yesterday. The support for slashed zeroes is most welcome.
Question: is Merriweather ST dead due to the shutdown of Webink?
Dear Eben,
I like your font & I’m using it in InDesign. There is a small problem with this:
When you type: ‘, it will look like: ,’ because there is something wrong with the kerning. I solve it by changing the spacing of the comma, but maybe you don’t know about this problem, so that’s the reason I send you this message.
Keep up the good work!
Best regards
Jeroen Reith
Is that the new version or the old version available for download here? If it isn’t the new one will you try that?
https://github.com/EbenSorkin/Merriweather
-e.
I downloaded it may 2017, and I find it a little bit tricky to change fonts while I’m still working on the project, and maybe there are are other changes?
by the way, we’re talking ’bout the Sans, I see in googlefont the latest version is from 2013…