I have bought a font with a really shitty license agreement and I have a couple of questions.

  1. 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)

  2. How can I remove the DSIG and other metadata from the ttf file while keeping it usable?

  3. 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

  • yokonzo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    343·
    9 months ago

    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

    • WarmSoda@lemm.eeEnglish
      8·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • tonyn@lemmy.mlEnglish
        361·
        9 months ago

        I use inkscape for vector graphics editing. It’s free and open source, and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

      • yokonzo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        9 months ago

        So I personally would use illustrator or inkscape, one thing you have to really understand though is while this isn’t very hard it will be very time consuming and monotonous. Just be warned. On average that could be 200-400 characters you have to trace, export, and put into a font compiler. Thousands if you’re doing a multilingual font. Again, You can do this, but I mostly meant it as a joke, it will be very tedious

        • WarmSoda@lemm.eeEnglish
          5·
          9 months ago

          I want it for general graphics, not a font. Really good advice though, thank you!

        • ProfessorProteus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          9 months ago

          Could they not just (in Illustrator) use the type tool for the characters they want and convert each character to paths? No tracing required!

          This is based solely on memory so I’m probably wrong somewhere lol

          • yokonzo@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            9 months ago

            You may actually be right. The only extra step would be placing them back into a font compiler just without whatever metadata originally existed

            • ProfessorProteus@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              9 months ago

              I use Adobe CuckCloud at work on my boss’ subscription. For personal stuff I have the Affinity suite. I know it’s also proprietary, but it’s a one-time purchase, and more importantly, not Adobe.

              Man I tried using Inkscape to make a small icon and it took me maybe 30 mins to do something that would have taken less than two minutes with Illustrator. I know there’s a learning curve to all software, but my experience was very bad. Pretty much every hotkey I wanted to use was different from its Illustrator counterpart. And even looking past that, the interface was horribly laggy on my machine. I have no idea what made the UI refresh at like 20fps but tolerating it was untenable for me.

              I’ll probably try it on another computer, and remap the hotkeys I use the most. If/when I eventually ditch Windows for Linux, I’ll need something that works, since Affinity’s stuff is Windows + Mac only.