2011 Nov 17 5:12 PM

Fonts for your PDF’s

Even though a content creator has a valid license for a font, that license may not allow embedding the font in a PDF document for commercial sale or even non-commercial public distribution. The issue is ambiguous, but of sufficient concern that Pat suspended PDF sales of Anomolous Subsurface Environment.

I did a little research, and the key phrase seems to be “free for commercial use”. The following links offer more than two dozen high quality fonts that can be freely embedded and redistributed, even for commercial use.

• Font Squirrel
• exljbris font foundry (the fonts listed under “free fonts”)
• Open Font License fonts
• League of Moveable Type
• Open Font Library

This font embedding license gotcha is another reason I’m happy with LaTeX.

4 comments:

ze bulette, November 17, 2011 at 11:19 PM

Very useful. Thanks for these, esp. the League link.

Brad, November 18, 2011 at 9:41 AM

I like the Linux Libertine fonts quite a bit. They were created for the purpose of avoiding this licensing nonsense.

Cygnus, November 30, 2011 at 10:48 AM

Hey, someone else is actually using LaTeX for OSR/RPG gaming material! :-) Actually, my own effort is probably going to cause Don Knuth to weep profusely, since I’m replacing his carefully designed CM fonts with Times…

garrisonjames, December 6, 2011 at 10:39 AM

Thanks for posting this. We’re clearing out all those ‘free’ fonts that are pretty much worthless for any project that we’d actually want to use them on…Font Squirrel is rather handy.

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