Fonts prohibiting installable embedding

[Paul Wise]

On Sat, Oct 2, 2021 at 9:12 PM Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> What I fear is that most authors of fonts (if they are reachable at
> all) are reluctant to change anything after a release.  As far as
> fonts provided by GUST (Latin Modern, TeX Gyre, etc.) are concerned
> I'm quite optimistic though.

I tend to think it is best if fonts aren't considered "read-only" -
fonts are best considered living projects that need various updates;
for changes in Unicode, changes in font rendering libraries, incorrect
glyph replacements, missing glyph additions, etc.

> What one could do is to ask the author(s) of fontforge to change the
> default settings.  This would solve the problem for many freely
> available fonts.

Agreed.

> I doubt that any existing program obeys those bits right now and
> therefor most font authors are not aware of them.

I found two tools to remove the embedding bits, so it seems like the
bits are definitely enforced somewhere, otherwise people wouldn't care
about removing them.

http://carnage-melon.tom7.org/embed/
https://github.com/hisdeedsaredust/ttembed
http://www.derwok.de/downloads/ttfpatch/

According to this 2015 blog post, Microsoft Office enforces the bits:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2015/07/06/document-font-embedding-demystified/

>From StackOverflow it sounds like Crystal Reports enforces them:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1228725/getting-crystal-to-properly-embed-tt-fonts-in-a-pdf

I've zero idea if any modern/libre/Linux software enforces the bits though.

> there is no reason to remove those fonts from the distributions.

Agreed, as long as the fonts have libre licensing.

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise