22 October 2013:
One item on my wish-list.
The typophile in me is screaming out loud now. 50 versions of Helvetica (a.k.a. best font in the world) with support for fractions, ligatures, ordinals, scientific inferiors, subscripts, superscripts, discretionary ligatures (!!!) and kerning!
Have I mentioned that it supports Latin (almost all Western European languages), Greek and Cyrillic (almost all Eastern European languages)? ... Excuse me while I wipe the froth coming out of my mouth.
But, and this is a big BUT, its price certainly is steep. €3160 is around SGD 5356, according to Google. That's almost $110 per font, and the whole thing can be a low-income worker's salary for nearly half a year.
So, no, I certainly will not waste money like that. Besides, a Macbook comes with Helvetica Neue (although with not as much support). Spending $1500 for a 13" Macbook Air makes more sense in the practical way.
But wait! That's not all! Apparently, after there is also Helvetica World, which supports Vietnamese, Arabic and Hebrew scripts! This, and Helvetica Neue, covers almost all languages (excluding the minority ones) except CJK.
Which, to me, is fantastic enough. And of course, if only I could own all of these typefaces. But then again, yes, it's very expensive. Helvetica World sells at €165 per typeface. If one were to get the four basic ones (55, 56, 75, 76), that's already €660 a.k.a. $1120 SGD.
Therefore, these fonts can only remain in my wishlist. Or maybe one day when I'm rich (and crazy) enough, I'll really buy them all. Helvetica just has this appeal that not many other fonts have; I'm crazily in love with it.
I know there are other font heavyweights such as Frutiger and Univers, to mention two, but somehow Helvetica catches my attention the most. Of course those two are nice in their own ways, as well.
TTFN.