Quote:
Originally Posted by kso
Hitch,
before I posted my question I was looking at a lot of fonts (and their licensing terms) for a children's book I've almost completed. Because of the length and complexity of many terms (especially compared to the simplicity of fonts for kid's books) I stopped reading licenses whenever something jarred, deleting the foundry from the list of potentials.
I can't remember which foundry's terms I found the subsetting restriction in first (I only keep URLs and licenses for those not discarded), but searching the hacker news post I linked to last week for either sub or setting you'll find a comment by "JustFinishedBSG":
"You'd be surprised by the number of foundries that explicitly forbid sub setting of the fonts (...), so you're not allowed to only use Latin on your website, gotta load the whole ... thing. The font has weird kerning and you want to fix it? Yeah, not sorry not allowed either."
Klaus
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I find the idea that any foundry would preclude subsetting to be odd at best. That means--I mean, let's all think this through--that you can't put it in PDF that's going to be distributed or used for printing. Why?
Because if you put the entire face in the PDF--not subset--then the less-than-honorable can rip out the entire face, and use it. There's nothing that really stops them. What good is using "no subsetting," then???? Is this some sort of half-brained notion that you can force people to pay for an ePUB or App license, by disallowing subsetting of the face? (Which,
legally, means that the font is not being redistributed. That's the point of subsetting, from
that view--the legal prevention view.)
"No embedding" is one thing--that
sort of makes sense, if you're trying to preclude the font from this or that.
But "no subsetting" feels ill-advised for any foundry.
ETA: P.S.: do we know if he's talking about entirely, or only for web-usage for the WOFFs, etc.? ???
Hitch