Fonttools includes a tool to convert TTF to XML and back again. Makes it easy to inspect and remove unwanted metadata
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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What's fun about that, is that fonts are copyrightable, but typefaces are not.
Is that in a particular land or what? Could you give a source?
Whats the difference?
Basically style vs the instructions that make up the font. It’s lead to a lot of rip offs (see: Helvetica vs. Arial).
Awesome, thank you! I'll try that
This is how u pirate a font:
Google “fontname GitHub”
The end.
I did that and:
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The only file that is correct is only of the regular version, so there are a lot of variations missing - you wouldn't be able to get the same files as by following the paid way. The upload is 8 years old and seems to be part of an opensource website.
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There is another upload from 4 years ago, where the files appear to be called by the same name, but it's not the same font at all. Seems to be part of a website again, which shows a couple of fonts for comparison. Maybe they've put it there as a placeholder.
Thats why I wanted to ask how to safely upload them.
Github is really a great piracy bro.
Yeah why not. Works in a pinch. I don’t recall where I said it was the most efficient or effective method though.
Well, if you really want to keep it you could drag it into a vector graphic editing software and trace each letter, make your own font set
Side question, does anyone have suggestions for a decent free vector editing software? I've been meaning to just search for one for a long time but I always forget about it.
I use inkscape for vector graphics editing. It's free and open source, and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.
So I personally would use illustrator or inkscape, one thing you have to really understand though is while this isn't very hard it will be very time consuming and monotonous. Just be warned. On average that could be 200-400 characters you have to trace, export, and put into a font compiler. Thousands if you're doing a multilingual font. Again, You can do this, but I mostly meant it as a joke, it will be very tedious
I want it for general graphics, not a font. Really good advice though, thank you!
Could they not just (in Illustrator) use the type tool for the characters they want and convert each character to paths? No tracing required!
This is based solely on memory so I'm probably wrong somewhere lol
You may actually be right. The only extra step would be placing them back into a font compiler just without whatever metadata originally existed
It’s a bit more barebones but I really like BoxySVG
Whatever you end up doing, make sure you don’t leave out the ARRRRRs
The first and last font I downloaded was the Quake font.
Marines we are at 5% force operational status
Please excuse my lack of knowledge here. Am I under to understand from your post that software that you have purchased from another supplier will check from files that you have bought from this supplier and refuse to use them based on their attestation?
If I have it right, it goes like this. I purchase the font package, the seller includes hidden in the files an identifier so they know it's mine. I share the files across the seven seas. The seller keeps a lookout for their fonts being shared, and spots it in the wild, downloads it and finds out who's it was.
Oh no, I understood the watermarking concern. This sort of thing is famous with with Oscar screeners and electronic books. I was asking about OP's suggestion that the font might be effectively withdrawn by a third party
Like I mentioned in my post, I don't really understand it, thats why I asked.
But I've read https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/dsig and to me it sounds like your OS for example (or any other software) could attempt to verify the validity of the DSIG of a font. If it works similarly to other types of signing, the certificate authority, in this case the creator of the font, could declare a font signed with a specific key invalid and your OS e.g. would then prohibit you from installing it.
But I may be completely wrong here. Maybe nobody is bothering with it, but since we live in DRM hell, I wnated to ask to make sure.
Thanks for explaining. I guess this would be comparable to e.g. Blu-ray key revocation. I suppose it's possible but I'm not sure how likely it is considering the potential downsides, e.g. legal liability, for anyone doing this, compared to I'm not sure what upsides where there's no profit to be found and all costs sunk
Isn't this easily bypassed by modifying the "hidden" part
If you even know what the hidden part(s) is, is the problem.
Maybe is in the metadata as someone pointed out earlier, or it could be an otherwise unused ASCII char that looks different for each user who licensed it when printed out, sort of like a qr code as a single ASCII char.
Or it could be that they simply just check filename, file size and/or md5, all of which can be easily changed.
Files have formats. Anything "hidden" here is destroyed by conversion to a different font format before redistribution.
There is no way of controlling this from the authors side without some sort of DRM.
@remindme@mstdn.social 2 weeks
@cuchilloc Ok, I will remind you on Monday Feb 19, 2024 at 10:53 AM PST.
Didn't know that the bot was ported to lemmy
Looks like it's a mastodon bot.