The licence, which is the part that bites

Four different permissions, sold separately

A typeface is software. What you bought is a licence, and it is normally split into uses that have nothing to do with each other.

• Desktop: installing it on a machine and setting type with it. Usually sold per seat or per workstation. This is the one you need for print work.
• Webfont: serving it from a website, usually priced by monthly pageviews.
• App / embedded: putting it inside software, a game, a kiosk or a device.
• Broadcast / e-publication: video, ads, ebooks.

Buying desktop does not give you web, and vice versa. A designer who licenses a face for their own machine, delivers the source file to the client, and the client installs it on six machines, has put the client in breach. Nobody intended anything dishonest and the invoice is still real.

“Free for personal use” means what it says

The largest category of trouble. Free-font aggregator sites host enormous numbers of faces marked free for personal use, which excludes anything a client pays you for. Many of them also host cracked cuts of commercial families under slightly altered names.

Two tests before you use a free font on paid work:

1. Find the actual licence file. A real open font ships an OFL.txt or a LICENSE alongside it. No licence file, no job.
2. Check the name table’s licence URL. ttx -t name -o - font.ttf prints it. A commercial foundry’s URL on a file you downloaded free is the signature of a cracked font.

What you can safely use, for anything

• Google Fonts: nearly all under the SIL Open Font Licence. Free for commercial use, embeddable, and you may sell the work you make. You may not sell the font itself, and if you modify it the modified version must also be OFL and must not use a reserved font name.
• Fontshare, from the Indian Type Foundry: free for personal and commercial use, and the quality is high.
• Ek Type: open Devanagari, Gujarati and Latin families.
• The League of Moveable Type, Velvetyne, Collletttivo: open foundries with real design behind them.
• Adobe’s open-source releases: Source Serif, Source Sans, Source Code.
• Noto, from Google: covers nearly every script in Unicode. Not always the most characterful choice, and always a correct one.

The OFL’s one practical trap: if you modify an OFL font (changing outlines for a wordmark, say) you must rename it. Reserved Font Names exist precisely so a modified file cannot masquerade as the original.

Outlining is not a licensing workaround

A common belief: converting text to outlines means the licence no longer applies, because there is no font in the file. It does not follow. The outlines are still the foundry’s drawings, and most desktop licences explicitly permit output as outlines in a final artwork file while forbidding redistribution of the font itself. Read the one paragraph; foundries are generally reasonable about exactly this case.

Where outlining does change things is in what you hand the printer. Outlines mean you are sending artwork. Sending the .ttf means you are distributing software, and that usually needs the licence to cover it or a separate “output provider” clause. Most licences have one. Check before you attach the file.

When a client supplies a font

They send you a .otf with the brief. Ask two questions in one email:

Do you hold a desktop licence for this typeface, and does it cover me as your supplier for the duration of this job?

If the answer is no or unclear, the safe move is to set the job in a licensed alternative and show them both. You are not being difficult; you are keeping their exposure off your invoice.

The practical record

Keep a fonts.txt in every project folder:

Body      Mukta Regular / SemiBold   SIL OFL 1.1   fonts.google.com/specimen/Mukta
Display   Cabinet Grotesk Bold       Fontshare     fontshare.com/fonts/cabinet-grotesk

Two minutes per job. It answers the question a year later when somebody needs to reset a page, and it is the document you point at if anybody ever asks.