Embedding Fonts and Legal Issues

[redpandagames]

Is embedding a font effectively distributing a font, or does the embed actually make images for all of the strings that you use?

I don't want to get in trouble for distributing fonts a million times if that's what I'm doing... How exactly does that work?

[Nifflas]

It depends on the license of the font itself. Different license agreements may define what "distributing a font" means differently. I doubt the Flash exporter converts the font to a raster one though.

Use anything on google web fonts and you're safe. 607 font families and you are allowed to use them in your commercial software - including distributing the font files as part of the game/software directory structure. The only thing you can not do is to sell the fonts themselves, the purpose must be to display text in your product.

Any font you download from the page comes with a nice license agreement within the .zip file. Check it out, it's pretty amazing.

[Olivier]

What an excellent find Nifflas, thank you very much!

[colej_uk]

Another useful site is dafont.com because you can see the license type next to the displayed font when you search. There are plenty of commercially free to use ones on there too.

[KLiK-iT]

Here is another site that's great for fonts and buttons! http://cooltext.com