understanding font licensing

Intro

Font formats

Mac OS X font installation

Managing fonts

Licensing fonts

•

•

•

Font licensing

Fonts are, largely, commercial products, and need to be treated as such. This means making sure you pay for fonts you use and, going further, making sure that enough font licenses are bought to cover the number of users who need the typefaces. As anyone who's ever tried to fathom this side of things knows, this is an intensely confusing subject. Different font foundries will have different licensing restrictions, many of them not particularly clearly spelled out. About all that's clear is that font designers put a huge amount of work into their creations, yet their products are probably, in the creative world at least, 'borrowed' even more than MP3 music tracks. Companies do need to take this seriously, as this is both unfair to font creators and also leaves organisations with unlicensed fonts in a fairly bad legal position.

Agfa-Monotype has been working on a solution to this problem, FontWise, which is intended to help organisations regain control over their fonts and font licenses. It is, of course, in the company's interests to do so, but it is also a move which has been long overdue. In many cases, particularly in larger groups, FontWise could well end up saving money in the long run. There are cases where publishing companies have been blanket-licensing fonts simply because it is impractical to manage usage well enough. During FontWise trials these organisations managed to rationalise where fonts were really needed and reduce the number of licenses needed from them on.

FontWise is a client-server suite meant for use by IT managers; the people who need to keep a grip on font usage and licensing across a network. The per-client cost is set to be around £30 per user for small groups, scaling down as the number of clients goes up. The full Macintosh solution is still being finalised, but judging by the beta version we looked at this seems likely to be a very useful tool for managing font installations and licenses. (For more information visit www.fontwise.com.)

Fonts are vital to any designer's work, and when managed well a large font library can be a delight. Keep things in the right place, use the right formats and keep an eye on licensing issues and your typographic creativity should never falter.