AboutFonts - mems/fstream GitHub Wiki

About fonts and licences

Polices

A font is a specific style of a type (bold, italic, light, etc.). So, a type is a group of fonts. In French, a font is called police and a type is called fonte.

LastResort or Unicode BMP Fallback SIL fonts are used for debug. It give respectively Unicode sets and Unicode char code. It used by some OS as fallback fonts in case of a important font could miss or don't required chars.

The majority of fonts don't have all 65535 unicodes chars glyphs, but some time, missing char could be displayed with a rectangle, ? in a black rhombus (depends fonts). See .notdef glyph (http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/notdef.gif).

Included fontes

Some fonts are included in a seperate package (see downloads), used as example for demos. Legal terms materials are also provided with fonts files. Most of it are under Open Font License, GNU General Public License, Creative Commons "Attribution-NonCommercial" or Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike".

Licenses

You must know about legals terms of all your externals resources you use (like types, librairies, graphical assets, etc.). Mutliple licenses could be exist for the same element. In addition, for the same font, a foundry could allow usage of a particular font on web sites (via CSS @font-face) whereas an other foundry could allow it.

Some licenses don't allow fonts to be embedded in document. Therefore, the only way to use these fonts is as device font. Some foundry allow it, but you need obtains a special license (often paid).

FontStream work as a progressive delivery, consist of usage of SWF format (embedding a font), similary to [shared library](Alternatives#Dynamic_shared_library Dynamic).

All fonts where SWF embedding is not disallowed could be used with FontStream.

Adobe attitude about this subject:

Subject: Re: Font licensing - Font container format
From: Christopher Slye <cslye arobase adobe.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 12:50:40 -0400
To: Memmie Lenglet <memmie arobase lenglet.name>

Thanks for you question. The simple answer is that Adobe considers font data embedded in PDF and SWF different than WOFF.

The more complicated answer:

The WOFF file format is described as a container in the WOFF spec, but that is the W3C's definition, not Adobe's. (I agree with the description, but I mention it to explain that Adobe's font licenses must depend on their own language, not any definition found elsewhere.)

WOFF is a very simple wrapper that can be used to transport an entire font, and with optional, supplementary data. When font data is embedded in PDF or SWF, it ceases to become a self-contained font, and becomes a component of that document -- unusable as a complete font elsewhere.

Please note that I can give you some general comments and advice here, but in the end, your own font's license is what determines what use is and isn't permitted.

Let me know if I can help further.

Regards,
Christopher


* * * *
Christopher Slye
Technical Product Manager, Type
Adobe Systems, Inc.
San Jose, California


On Mar 22, 2011, at 1:29 PM, Memmie Lenglet wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I just read your post about the position of Adobe on Web fonts licencing:
> http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2010/10/web-font-licensing.html
> 
> I'm working on a derived system of siFR.
> 
> Actually, siFR load one SWF (where a font is embeded) per font to 
> display any text with this font.
> But it impossible to do that in some Asian texts where more than 10k 
> chars glyphs needed (and a equivalent SWF will weigh few MB)
> 
> So my solution, instead of loading whole glyphs, load few SWF depending 
> which char will be displayed.
> For example you display this text: "Hello world!", where the fellow (8) 
> glyphs are needed: "!", "d", "e", "H", "l", "o", "r", "w". I'm loading 8 
> glyphs insteand more than one/two hundred for latin languages.
> 
> But I found a contradiction in what you said, so I not sure about legacy 
> against font licences you provide:
> "Adobe does not allow the use of fonts on the web in any format, WOFF or 
> otherwise."
> "EULA refers to “document embedding,” it’s referring to electronic 
> documents like PDF and SWF (Flash) files"
> "Adobe-owned fonts may be used with both sIFR and Cufón."
> 
> sIFR use font on the web in SWF format, so what the difference you made 
> between a SWF, only used to containing a font, the WOFF format (font 
> container - see below) or a proprietary format containing font data/glyps ?
> 
> "WOFF should be regarded as a container format or "wrapper" for font 
> data" - http://www.w3.org/TR/WOFF/#Introduction
> 
> So you said WOFF format is not allowed, but if instead I load in a HTML 
> document, with JavaScript, a SWF/PDF file and I parse it to use it in 
> CSS, it's OK (I'm not loading a font file)?
> 
> 
> Thank if you can light me up
> 
> Memmie Lenglet
> http://memmie.lenglet.name

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