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Stewf sure will chime in, he can tell you exactly …

That quote makes me hesitate, but it seems to me that Fontshop has made the preview abilities so good for exactly this purpose.

I think perhaps what you’ve quoted, Florian, is actually referring to someone stealing the code or other information.

I think there are people that abuse the feature (I’m thinking people who make web graphics for their ebay store) and that’s probably why the public re-use of the bitmaps is not technically allowed. But if the images are being used by someone who intends to license the font then the vendor shouldn’t really object. Putting that into the terms of use of a Web site would be tricky - so I’m guessing this is another case of “turn a blind eye from the font guy”.

Note that some sites (or foundries on distributors sites) use watermarks, stripes of give their previews a background color in order to prevent misuse.

Florian’s quote makes me hesitate too.
In fact, I’m not using the font for personal use, but it’s not a commercial use either. It’s just to test the fonts, share those tests with other people to decide which typeface is more suitable, and then buy the chosen font.
It would be quite nice if I could afford to buy all the fonts, but things are not that easy :)

@sii:

What does turn a blind eye from the font guy mean?
(my English is bad) :)

If a bit of sampling helps to sell a font or two, why would a foundy object? It works for cheese stores and bakeries. I can’t thrw much of a party party with the little slivers of cheese they hand out in the store, and it seems to me that PNGs of a font won’t be very useful for turning out a finished design project. It’s just a taste.

-=®=-

The FontShop previews exist specifically for testing fonts. Low-res comping is a perfectly legitimate use. Like Russell says, we hope you like our stuff and come back to license the fonts.

Thank you guys.

The FontShop preview is outstanding. I love the different sizes. I had a rather long name I am using Titling Gothic Extended Light with for a website and business stationery, etc. and FontShop’s preview was the only way to show the whole name to my client. He loved it and I bought it.

I think FontShop has done a great job of meeting their customer’s needs with their font preview and their shopping cart.

Sharon

>What does turn a blind eye from the font guy mean?

Sorry, it means that even if its technically against the rules they’re not going to stop you doing it.

Some foundries watermark their font previews, others don’t.
That sums up how they view potential usage.

On my site I have a large type tester with no watermark, and several layout features such as colour and tracking, among other reasons to encourage people to use sample settings in comps. Sure, some may use screen grabs as finished art, but I figure that’s a reasonable trade-off.

I’m a bit curious as to the reverse misuse of font preview data - by tracking IP addresses and the words people are setting it might be possible for a distributor to uncover future top-secret projects and branding choices months ahead of official announcements - “People at Apple seem to be really interested in setting the word ‘iSpoon’ in grunge fonts - wonder what they’re up to?” or how about this one – if someone were setting “Death to America!” in various typefaces would you hand their IP address over to the FBI?

Several months ago I proposed low-cost, single-use font licensing as a way to get students to purchase fonts. Now I am wondering if something similar could be done using Flash to sell outlines of a few characters to people who just only want to use a font once and can’t justify buying said font. Has anyone ever thought about using a type-tester style app to sell a short sample of preset type, charging per character used, and delivering an automatically generated EPS file?

Letterror + House have been promising to do this for several years using the Plinc library. Links...

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=plinc+letterror&src=IE-SearchBox

> I think FontShop has done a great job of meeting their customer’s needs with their font preview

Thanks, Sharon. If you don’t mind a little horn tooting, we also put a lot of effort into the recent enhancement of our character set viewer to organize and display all the extra glyphs in OpenType fonts. Examples:

• Contextual alternates in P22 Cézanne Pro
• Swash caps in Adobe Caslon Pro
• Discretionary ligs in FF Meta Serif

All of these OT feature showings can be linked directly, or pulled as an image.