I have bought a font with a really shitty license agreement and I have a couple of questions.
-
How can I best share the font with the community? (I am afraid of metadata in the font files, which may be tied to my payment account etc. - I had to register and log in to download the ttf files)
-
How can I remove the DSIG and other metadata from the ttf file while keeping it usable?
-
Are they able to detect it if I use the font in a commercial product online by crawling my website and if yes, how could I prevent an automatic detection attempt?
To my (and possibly your) surprise, I didn’t find any free downloads of the font online. Their license is tied to a personal account, you have to log into once a year to keep the license. As far as I understand they theoretically could use the DSIG to let the ttf files “expire”, at least when used in software that verifies the signature. But I may be wrong, please let me know.
Thanks in advance and cheers-I mean ARR
The first and last font I downloaded was the Quake font.
Fonttools includes a tool to convert TTF to XML and back again. Makes it easy to inspect and remove unwanted metadata
What’s fun about that, is that fonts are copyrightable, but typefaces are not.
This is how u pirate a font:
Google “fontname GitHub”
The end.
I did that and:
-
The only file that is correct is only of the regular version, so there are a lot of variations missing - you wouldn’t be able to get the same files as by following the paid way. The upload is 8 years old and seems to be part of an opensource website.
-
There is another upload from 4 years ago, where the files appear to be called by the same name, but it’s not the same font at all. Seems to be part of a website again, which shows a couple of fonts for comparison. Maybe they’ve put it there as a placeholder.
Thats why I wanted to ask how to safely upload them.
-
@remindme@mstdn.social 2 weeks
@remindme@mstdn.social 2 weeks
@ThoGot Ok, I will remind you on Monday Feb 19, 2024 at 10:53 PM PST.
@cuchilloc Ok, I will remind you on Monday Feb 19, 2024 at 10:53 AM PST.
Whatever you end up doing, make sure you don’t leave out the ARRRRRs
Well, if you really want to keep it you could drag it into a vector graphic editing software and trace each letter, make your own font set
Side question, does anyone have suggestions for a decent free vector editing software? I’ve been meaning to just search for one for a long time but I always forget about it.
I use inkscape for vector graphics editing. It’s free and open source, and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.