font licensing issues

Forum Moderators: not2easy

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font licensing issues

does the license apply across different character sets?

LifeinAsia

7:59 pm on Aug 26, 2014 (gmt 0)

Just came across an issue that started out technical and has bled over into licensing.

Some of out users aren't happy with the default Korean font used on the site. So I looked around and installed some Korean fonts that have open licenses.

The funny thing is the regular (low ASCII) characters changed, but not the Korean characters (high ASCII). I did some digging and apparently those fonts I used the euc-kr character set, while the site uses utf-8. I found another site that specifically lists the fonts as Unicode, downloaded those, and all the characters display as expected. Unfortunately, the second site does not list the licensing terms of the fonts.

So my question is: does the license apply to the font itself, or the would using a different character encoding have a different license?

not2easy

8:48 pm on Aug 26, 2014 (gmt 0)

Not all fonts include all characters so it seems reasonable that IF the characters are included in the font set as encoded they are part of the licensed set.

Changing the encoding used to display a font does not change the font characters. They may display incorrectly in a different encoding, but if they are displaying correctly they had to be created as part of the font set. The only way I see this is that the license must apply to the entire font set and not bits and pieces of it or only under some limited character set (display) settings on your site.

There are others here with more personal experiences that may be much more helpful, my opinion is based on the limited reading I have done when I thought I wanted to make my own fonts. I know each character is a separate creation and I just don't think that you would get them all if they aren't all included in the licensing.

LifeinAsia

9:02 pm on Aug 26, 2014 (gmt 0)

OK, it makes sense that the characters themselves are licensed. The encoding is just a mapping for which character is which (e.g., in euc-kr, character "yada" may be represented by 543, while in utf-8 it is represented by 1648).

By that reasoning, it seems that a font with an open license listed for the euc-kr encording would have the same license for the font with the utf-8 encoding.

tangor

9:43 pm on Aug 26, 2014 (gmt 0)

Check he font info itself. Most font files contain the copyright/license within the font file itself. Some copyright/use variations on fonts can be "embed", "view", "print", "full use", "no restrictions", etc. (or any combination...)

Don't confuse key coding with copyright of fonts... that coding just tell the font what is requested UNDER that encoding.

Aside: Many font files have placeholder characters which are different from the "font" which is why some characters can display incorrectly if requested, and this is particularly true of decorative fonts, not language fonts.