Typophile

Re: Font Legalities

torvum

Hello. This is my first post so please take it easy on me!

I was wondering if it was legal at all to take a font file, export a handful of characters from it and use it on a website? To be clear, I'm talking about commercial fonts like "Century Gothic", for example, and by "use it on a website", I mean hosting a 5-character font file and distributing it to visitors to the site.

Thanks!

PS: Can you recommend any good font editors/creators for Linux? Cheers.

As a rule redistributing any part of a font is only allowed in the case of what are called "libre" fonts.

hhp

I think you will just have to snack on a sour apple: Make GIF or PNG files with whatever word(s) you want. Subsetting commercial fonts is generally not permitted unless you pay the foundry a wodge of money for the privilege.

As said above, not without express permission from the foundry or designer. Really good quality libre fonts are limited in number but they do exist, the Source family from Adobe, Lato by Łukasz Dziedzic and the SIL fonts being some good examples.

Can you recommend any good font editors/creators for Linux?

FontForge will be your best bet. There is a great community currently supporting and updating the tool.

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