Tell me about fonts
David_Olshanski:
I am considering publishing my game via PDF. Nominal fee or perhaps free.
I thought I had all of my T's dotted and I's crossed, but I've just seen some posts about fonts requiring a license, or not available for commercial products... even though I have several fonts bundled with my word processing software.
I have Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 and Microsoft Publisher 2007. I was planning on just doing my own layout and creating a PDF with my meager resources. I've heard though that I may have to pay for a license to use specific fonts.
I am unclear about whether this is necessary, and if so, what are some very inexpensive options? My goal is not to make money, but to lose as little as possible.
Any advice would be appreciated.
My real name is David Olshanski, if you don't want to use my alias.
iago:
Be very, very careful about using fonts that are for "display" and "headers" rather than "body copy", regardless of what you do. I've seen too many publishers use a font for their body text that does NOT work in large quantities (comic book fonts, decorative fonts, etc).
There are a number of good free font sites out there that you can find via google. Look for the fonts that say they're actually free for use, not just free for personal use. Make sure early on to do a test with the fonts you select to determine if they are "embeddable" -- if you get deep into layout and discover that they aren't, it can be a real pain. If you're looking to go outside the fonts you already have on your computer, definitely look to find ones that have a full set of weights and styles: Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic -- as well as a fairly full character set (left and right-handed quotation marks, all the shift-number symbols, all the numbers, all punctuation, etc).
Eero Tuovinen:
Fred nailed the main points, listen to him. Also: ask more questions if you need to, especially about choosing the right fonts and such. Folks sometimes have some weird notions about that.
Generally speaking, intellectual property concerning fonts works the same as any other IP (especially computer programs), so if you have any experience with other kinds, you know what to look for in font copyright statements. It should also be noted that a font copyright claim is pretty easy to remove, but if the name of the font is the same, you can also find out easily whether any major font foundry claims copyright to whatever font you found in the internet. Remember when researching, though, that many foundries have fonts with the same names as a font from another (potentially free) source; sometimes the only way to figure out whether some piratic-looking free font is a stripped commercial stuff is to research the history of the font in question and to compare the cut with the commercial alternative. (For an example, check out the umpteen different fonts named "Garamond", as well as the near-identical copies going under other names such as "Granjon"; I just worked on a layout from hell that used Garamond fonts from three different foundries all mixed up.)
Peter Nordstrand:
Fred and Eero,
David is asking if the fonts bundled with his word processing software requires a special license for publishing commercially.
iago:
Quote from: Peter Nordstrand on April 28, 2008, 12:17:15 PM
Fred and Eero,
David is asking if the fonts bundled with his word processing software requires a special license for publishing commercially.
The answer with that is almost always no.
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