Piracy?

26 February 2009

This has been the immediate concern of my teammates when I presented a video clip demonstrating an extract-font-from-pdf prototype.

To avoid any misconsceptions, I want to make things crystal clear right now. While it’s theorically possible to reuse such an extracted font, there are two issues to keep in mind:

First, no matter how you obtain a copy of a font file, no one (and certainly not me) gives you permission to use it in a way which is in violation of the license terms. These are explicitly displayed in Fontmatrix’s “Information” tab (which is the default view) – if available in the font file. Moreover, the validity of a font license depends on the jurisdiction and can vary between countries.

Second, and most important for RIAA-minded people, you’ll hardly find a PDF document that contains a usable stand-alone font. It’s almost always a subset of an original font, and re-encoded to fit in a particular document.

The abovementioned video clip did just demonstrate this, but unfortunately, it seems it was necessary to write this comment. Ah, and for those asking “what’s the use of such a feature then?”, well, it’s fun.

The video clips, on blip.tv and fontmatrix.net, are lost.

From the old Fontmatrix website: the text as it was written, with links to archived copies where the originals are gone. Archived original. All old pages.