Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
Are ePub creators limited in their choice of fonts due to font vendors' forbidding of third-party distribution of their commercial fonts? And are there reliable software-based methods to check a given font's permission settings?
- Ahi
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Font-related legal issues are extremely complicated and opinions differ widely; also laws are different in different countries. Also not being a lawyer, I cannot give you any legal advice, but here is some food for thought.
Fonts that are used in your document can be made available to the reader in several ways. You can rely on reader already having appropriate fonts, you can pass them along with the document or you can embed them in the document. Most commercial fonts EULAs prohibits pass-along (redistribution), but for many fonts embedding for printing and viewing (but not editing) is allowed. The problem is that the term "embedding" is often not well-defined. If you simply zip the original font together with the rest of your document (even after the result is renamed to have .epub extension) you could argue that this constitutes redistribution, not embedding. Embedding implies that the font is an integral part of the document and cannot be extracted from the document without considerable effort. One way to do that is to subset the font to only include glyphs which are used in the document. The other is to scramble the font bytes, so simply unzipping it would not make it usable. Adobe defined a mechanism for that which is implemented in Adobe EPUB readers and InDesign. Recently IDPF came up with its own algorithm for that, but it is not widely implemented yet.
References:
http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/info...glingSpec.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/digitalp...protection.pdf
http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditio...ry_writte.html