Shipping Fonts with Applications

Shipping Fonts with Applications

The standard licenses for almost all commercial fonts only permit fonts to be installed onto personal computers and not onto servers or redistributed with other products. Thus applications, whether web-based, or shipping as standalone products for PCs, Macs, game consoles or other devices, all require an extended use license.

For example, the Ascender Corp. End User License Agreement (EULA) allows the fonts to be used on five workstations. Installing fonts onto additional workstations, onto servers for use with web-based applications, or including fonts with software applications or hardware products all require additional licenses. More information on Ascender’s EULA and font licensing overview can be found here.

There are a variety of application software technologies and platforms available to developers today. Using fonts in these applications require that the fonts be installed (permanently or temporarily) on the local computer, or in many cases they can be compiled into the application.

Embedding permissions only apply to document embedding, and provide no rights to redistribute fonts with applications, games or devices.

The following is a summary of different application platforms:

JavaScript™

A popular client-side web tool is JavaScript. This is a scripting language which is widely supported by almost all web browsers. JavaScript can be used to create web applications that use fonts in dynamic ways.

Adobe Flash™

Flash is used to add multimedia content to web pages, from animations to video, and Flash can also be used to create rich Internet applications. The Adobe Flash Player plug-in is required to view Flash applications in a web browser or on a desktop. Fonts can be compiled into Flash (SWF) files. Some EULAs permit the redistribution of fonts within Flash files, most do not specifically mention Flash based redistribution, and to further complicate the issue some Flash files resemble traditional documents, while others are much more like applications or games. The best suggestion we can offer is that before compiling fonts into Flash files read the font EULA and if in doubt contact the font vendor for advice. Most font vendors are aware of Flash and will be happy to provide guidance.

Windows Presentation Foundation™ (WPF)

WPF is Microsoft’s unified presentation subsystem for Windows Vista™ (and available for Windows XP SP2). WPF based applications can expose the advanced typographic features in OpenType fonts, and use ClearType sub-pixel font rendering to get great resultson screen. The Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) provides clear guidance on WPF font redistribution issues, and there’s also a separate page on redistributing fonts with News Reader applications.

Microsoft Silverlight™

Silverlight can be used to create rich Internet applications, similar to Flash. Fonts can be compiled into Silverlight applications. Contact your font vendor for details on your right to redistribute fonts with Silverlight applications.