‘Embedded Web Fonts Return. Uh-oh.’

Stephen Coles on the announcement of WebKit’s support for embedded TrueType fonts:

This reopens the legal can of worms that falls off the shelf every time we talk about font embedding. Good fonts cost money. Like most software, each user or CPU must be licensed to use commercial fonts. When you start talking about every visitor of a web page downloading fonts, well, you enter very sticky territory indeed.

The conundrum is that most of the fonts worth using can’t legally be shared as free downloads, and most of the fonts that are legally shareable aren’t worth using.

★ Thursday, 4 October 2007