Legal use of Windows fonts?

[Khaalis]

Hey all. I have a quick question.

I put together fan created 4E .pdf materials here on the boards and typically try to mimic the basic feel of the core books (so they are familiar and easy to read). I usually do the source files in Word 2007, which uses Calibri and Cambria as the standard fonts (and are pretty decent substitutes for the WotC body text fonts).

However, does anyone know if there is some form of licensing or legality issue for using these fonts in such a work? I've had someone suggest that I instead use only "freeware" fonts due to some form of legality issue of using Microsoft's fonts, which I had never heard of before.

Has anyone else heard of or run into this? Any light you could shed on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ZombieButch]

I don't have either of those installed, but one thing you might try is right clicking on them in your Fonts folder and selecting Properties. Fonts usually have a License tab in their properties menu, and you can either find either the license information or a link to it there.

 

[Khaalis]

Thanks for the information. All these years and I had never realized this information was included in the properties.

 

[Marius Delphus]

As long as you own or have a license to a product which installed fonts on your system, you should have a license to use those fonts.

 

[jelmore]

As long as you own or have a license to a product which installed fonts on your system, you should have a license to use those fonts.

I am not a lawyer, but I do work in the technical side of the publishing industry.

Fonts are complex pieces of software in their own right; while a lot of people think of them as "just fonts" and free for the taking, lemme tell ya that any decent publisher most certainly does not.

If you are looking to use fonts for publishing a commercial product, I would recommend checking with the vendor that produced them if you don't have a copy of the license agreement. Many "freeware" fonts are not licensed for commerical use; the same may go for fonts supplied by the operating system.

 

[see]

(Yeah, I'm way late)

The http://www.microsoft.com/typography/truetypeproperty21.mspx font properties extension gives lots of extra tabs for font properties, including specific tabs for both "license" and "embedding". For fonts supplied with Windows, you'll usually find explicit permission for "editable embedding", which will let you use that font in your product.

The "free" fonts you find on "free font" websites are not always safe; some of those are out-and-out pirated, others have noncommercial-only licenses or whatnot. The absolute safest free fonts, legally, are the ones released under the GPL-with-Embedding-Exception or the Open Font License. They're completely free to redistribute or embed.