Source of fonts for embedding in free ePubs

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by bobcdy

Another free font site is
www.fonts101.com

I don't know anything about its legality, but it advertises hundreds of free fonts that I believe must be ok for epub 'embedding' if the site is legally distributing the fonts.

I'm very wary of this site. True, in its "disclaimer" it reads:

All fonts found on this site are copyrighted by their respective authors. Detailed copyright information to each individual font may be included in the corresponding downloadable font-files, otherwise the selected font license that comes along with the font details is applicable. All of the fonts offered on this website are in the public domain and either demoware, freeware, postcardware or shareware.

Shareware and demoware shouldn't be embedded anyway, but I tried a few, and what they say about copyright info inside the downloaded files doesn't ring true. Normally, there was no explciit license in the .zip file, and looking at the metadata inside a few examples, most claimed that all rights of the copyright were still reserved.

What I like about Font Squirrel is that you can actually see the license. (I also like the number of usually-higher-quality .otf fonts vs. ttf fonts and that you can separate them.)

Note, these are all pretty much under copyright, but with a generous license that allows for free distribution and use.

There is another source of many non-copyrighted fonts, Southern Software, Inc.

There's a discussion of that one at typophile here -- sounds a bit unclear, but I gather the complany went bankrupt and so there's no one to enforce the copyright, even if, in some legal sense, if the company were to somehow resurface, there might be an issue. And one person questions their legality in the first place in that thread I linked to (though the arguments seem dubious to me). In any case, their site no longer exists so you'd have to acquire their fonts from some other site anyway.

[darkpoet]

Fontsquirrel and fonts101.com both look like most "free fonts" sites... questionable content ripped-off from various sources. At the very least these two sites both list some Larabie Fonts... which are NOT allowed to be embedded using @font-face (as I've already stated). Go ahead and search their databases but go to the source when it comes to license issues. There are hundreds of font sites out there and most of their content is questionable since there are only a few major font foundries. There are, of course, many fonts that exist not made by a foundry... and these questionable sites are good repositories of these fonts made by the "guy-next-door" but again, I stress, go to the source and research the license carefully. Many of these fonts are distributed legally, sure but...

Commercial use is not the same as embedding. Commercial use itself has several meanings... it usually means you can make printouts using the font and distribute it (using it as a trademark or directly profiting from it are different matters)... as a side-note, it's interesting to note that most fonts included with Microsoft Windows or Office are in a gray area. They are not explicitly permitted for commercial use and indeed are only licensed for one-computer use... indeed, most are property of Monotype, a corporation that would love to sue you if you tried to use their fonts in an unauthorized way...

I didn't look at Kernest... the memory it started to take up nearly crashed my poor work notebook. What in the heck do they need to load hundreds of fonts on their top page for..?!?

[darkpoet]

Oh, and even if you do find a good font that seems free... beware that it may be a ripoff of a commercial font. In my quest for a Papyrus clone, I discovered a thread in which the typographer himself comments that no clone that exists is legal. A close look at the various clones reveals the plagiarism. If you want to play typesetter, remember your moral obligation to the typographer...

[frabjous]

The typographer was either lying or misinformed. (Unless he just meant of Papyrus in particular.) Lots of clones are legal so long as they are made independently, and the original design of the fonts are in the public domain. (As most of the classics are.)

Otherwise, how could it be that each of the major foundries has its own (slightly different) version of Garamond, or Baskerville, or Times?

Others were donated into the public domain, such as Bitstream Charter, which is cloned in unequestionably free and legit fonts like Charis SIL. Same goes with Knuth's Computer Modern and clones/derivatives like GUST's Latin Modern.

Font Squirrel is definitely on the up and up, and the Larabie fonts are free to add with the Font Face tag. They just ask you to obscure their names so they're not easy to guess. details here -- Font Squirrel has a @font-face generator that actually changes the names of the fonts during the process.

I can't imagine that doing that would even be necessary for ePub embedding, since it'd be a hassle to get them that way anyway.

Still, I agree with your advice to try to track down and visit the actual foundry or designer's website -- sometimes you learn a little about the font and its vision that way too, which is interesting. I particularly like The League of Moveable Type, which has a number of high-quality generous license fonts (listed on Font Squirrell).

[bobcdy]

Frabjous,
Thanks for the info about the sites I mentioned and about fontsquirrel. Many years ago I purchased the Southern Software, Inc. cd

"Southern Software, Inc. gives you the BEST font package on the planet! The price is only $29.95 (plus shipping and handling) for "Just My Type" - 3320 professional quality fonts on one CD."

and often have wondered about the legality of using these fonts. When I purchased them, the company's copyrights had not been disputed, and I had learned about the company in a Wall Street Journal article about it. I never did use them, but now with embedded fonts in epub I have started thinking about it again. I did a web search about this but never found any definite answer (the only one that seemed sort of pertinent was the one you listed, but there was no conclusion about legality). There are a number of sites discussing SSI copyright problems, but nothing about current use of the out-of-business's fonts. SSI fonts are now widely available individually on the internet and are used in various places, but there's still questions in my mind about using them for ebooks. The advantage to using them is that there are a lot of these fonts available, many look pretty good although sometimes kerning is not so good, and of course anyone with an inexpensive font-making program like Font-Creator can take an SSI font (or any other font) and obscure its origin. Also, when used in an epub and opened in Sigil, the font name is replaced by 'font001.ttf, font002.ttf... I actually used an internet distributed SSI font in two of my recent epubs, and wondered whether it's legal to continue with this practice.

Bob

[bobcdy]

I did another search and found this article:

http://www.naavi.org/cl_editorial_04..._font_case.pdf

According to the conclusions, pt. V of this document, the Southern Software, Inc. case was legally binding only in Northern California as of 1978. I was unable to find any extension of it to the entire US, so it looks as though it's probably ok to use SSI fonts in epubs. I'm very interested in other viewpoints and urls about legality of using SSI fonts!
Bob

[frabjous]

Legality? No clue.

Morally, I think it's OK so long as you don't have any direct evidence that the particular font in question is a rip off of a real font still under copyright and still being sold by a legitimate foundry.

I'm not really that familiar with their fonts, but I would think that soon this would be a moot issue, since they're not updating their fonts, and even if you like the aesthetics, surely having a Unicode-rich .otf font is going to be preferable in most cases.

[darkpoet]

Here is the thread regarding the Papyrus clones... take a look at the location of the notches and scuffs of each letter, and that's where the ripoff artists really give themselves away. It's not just the font itself ripped off... digitizing a font takes many hundreds of hours and the ripoff artists couldn't even be bothered to reverse-engineer the font (ie, printing it, tracing it, and re-coding it); they just made some minor adjustments to the file and stuck their name on it...


...if you're a writer, imagine how angry you would feel if some took your ebook, renamed a few characters, edited a few plot points, changed the title, then took credit for your work. We're not talking about inspiration, here...

Which is exactly why I stress that if you like a font, be sure it is the genuine article... and then give credit where it's due.

[brewt]

Many free fonts include this in the license agreement, or something like it:

"You may not provide the font or make it accessible to any other third parties."

Straight inclusion of the font, without encryption, violates this, as an epub is but a zip file. If the user can pull the font out of the epub and install it and use it, the epub is violating the license.

Word to the wise.

-bjc

[darkpoet]

Originally Posted by bobcdy

Also, when used in an epub and opened in Sigil, the font name is replaced by 'font001.ttf, font002.ttf...

I just wanted to comment on your font-naming scheme... I discovered recently while trimming my TTFs for embedding that my Sony Reader appears to use some of its internal memory as a font cache... In one epub, I had deleted all non-numbers from a font... A few days later, I scratched my head wondering why that font was not functioning in my second epub... when I realized that the numbers were displaying just fine. I did a hard-reset of the Reader and the second epub displayed that font just fine... I didn't experiment to see if the font cache works on the file name or the proper font name inside the TTF file but I wonder... (and I can guarantee the cache doesn't work based on your CSS naming).

[bobcdy]

Darkpoet,
The font001.ttf, etc. is not MY naming - it automatically seems to occur whenever an epub is open with Sigil 0.1.9. I tried experimenting - after creating an epub with the original font name, I unzipped it and looked at the font name and it was still the original. However, after I opened it in Sigil, saved, and unzipped, the font name had been changed in the font subdirectory to font.001.ttf.

[bobcdy]

frabjous,

Although I think it probably is legally ok to use Southern Software, Inc. fonts in epubs, I really haven't fully thought out the morality of using them but here are a few of my current thoughts:
I'm not sure that morality is violated when a rip-off font is used in a free epub created with no goal of selling it for the following reason: the original font creator company declines to let its font be used as an ebedded epub font so that use of the rip-off does not damage sales of the original font in any way because it can't be used in the epub. Further, if the epub was the ONLY way that someone could obtain the rip-off, then sales of the original font might be damaged because a source of the rip-off appears where none was available before the epub became available online. Then, it would be clearly immoral to use it in an epub, but this is not the situation that prevails because the rip-off is freely available on the internet at many different sites.

I may stop using the Southern Software, Inc. fonts in epubs because the morality is questionable, and if enough MobilRead readers object to my using them.

darkpoet:
Thanks for the info about the Papyrus font. I would agree with you about the analogy of using a rip-off font to using a rip-off e-novel except for the difference in how the copyrights/patents are treated for novels and fonts. Novels are clearly protected, but fonts are not - only in how a look-alike font is created. The courts in the US have concluded that using a computer program to slightly modify the control points of a font is illegal (Adobe vs Southern Software, Inc.), but that printing high-resolution characters of the font, scanning them, and then using the scans to create the font is not illegal. Thus to know about whether a look-alike font is actually an illegal font, one has to know how it was created. There are many look-alike fonts from reputable companies that presumably are legal. If the e-novel analogy were followed, these look-alike fonts all would be illegal and their use immoral except for the original one.

Bob

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by bobcdy

Darkpoet,
The font001.ttf, etc. is not MY naming - it automatically seems to occur whenever an epub is open with Sigil 0.1.9. I tried experimenting - after creating an epub with the original font name, I unzipped it and looked at the font name and it was still the original. However, after I opened it in Sigil, saved, and unzipped, the font name had been changed in the font subdirectory to font.001.ttf.

That doesn't happen anymore from Sigil 0.2.0beta1 onwards.