Fonts prohibiting installable embedding

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2021-10-01 at 16:37:43 -0600, Karl Berry wrote:

 >     restriction. For a list of fonts in Debian (search for "texlive")
 >
 > The string "texlive" does not appear on either page? (I guess I'm
 > going crazy?)  I see "tex-gyre" on the otf page, but I suppose that
 > is a separate packaging.

Hi Karl,
I suppose that Norbert means "texmf" instead of "texlive".

 >     Anyway, my question is on how do we deal with this in TeX Live?
 >     ignore? discuss with the authors? ...?
 >
 > If original fonts distributed in TL have the flag set, we should
 > discuss with authors. Is there a simple cmdline tool that can check
 > a file?

Yes, TTX can convert TrueType and Opentype fonts to XML and back:

   https://github.com/fonttools/fonttools

or (on CentOs 7)

   yum install fonttools

 > In any case, I would not consider this a reason to start removing
 > fonts willy-nilly. I'd like to see some kind of confirmation or
 > evidence that the font designers actually intended to restrict
 > embedding, not just an obscure flag that was probably not set
 > intentionally 99% of the time.

I assume that the *only* legally relevant document is the license and
thus don't see any reason to waste any time or to bother the authors.

In this case I'm convinced that Debian did too much of a good thing.
If we can't rely on the license file, is there anything we can rely on
at all?  Can a stupid comment in the source code of a program render
the license file invalid?  Certainly not.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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