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How to pirate a font (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have bought a font with a really shitty license agreement and I have a couple of questions.

How can I best share the font with the community? (I am afraid of metadata in the font files, which may be tied to my payment account etc. - I had to register and log in to download the ttf files)
How can I remove the DSIG and other metadata from the ttf file while keeping it usable?
Are they able to detect it if I use the font in a commercial product online by crawling my website and if yes, how could I prevent an automatic detection attempt?

To my (and possibly your) surprise, I didn't find any free downloads of the font online. Their license is tied to a personal account, you have to log into once a year to keep the license. As far as I understand they theoretically could use the DSIG to let the ttf files "expire", at least when used in software that verifies the signature. But I may be wrong, please let me know.

Thanks in advance and cheers-I mean ARR

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

I want it for general graphics, not a font. Really good advice though, thank you!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

You may actually be right. The only extra step would be placing them back into a font compiler just without whatever metadata originally existed

[+] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I use Adobe CuckCloud at work on my boss' subscription. For personal stuff I have the Affinity suite. I know it's also proprietary, but it's a one-time purchase, and more importantly, not Adobe.

Man I tried using Inkscape to make a small icon and it took me maybe 30 mins to do something that would have taken less than two minutes with Illustrator. I know there's a learning curve to all software, but my experience was very bad. Pretty much every hotkey I wanted to use was different from its Illustrator counterpart. And even looking past that, the interface was horribly laggy on my machine. I have no idea what made the UI refresh at like 20fps but tolerating it was untenable for me.

I'll probably try it on another computer, and remap the hotkeys I use the most. If/when I eventually ditch Windows for Linux, I'll need something that works, since Affinity's stuff is Windows + Mac only.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I am on Linux and I just wanted to add that for obvious reasons illustrator runs far worse on Linux (through wine) compared to Inkscape.

I had to learn Illustrator for a uni course and while the shortcuts and gui are different, once I got accustomed to it, I prefer it in my case.

The only real gripe is that Illustrator has some more powerful features, (like for example gradient along a path, which in Inkscape can be done only very hackily). This is due to Inkscape only using SVG features while adobe does it's own. agic under the hood.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'm in a similar spot with After Effects. I think there's just nothing out there that comes even close for motion graphics, except maybe Blender. I simply haven't taken the time to learn it.

By pure coincidence I found a font just last night that I had been searching for, on and off, for years—on archive.org of all places. Kind of funny that you came back and replied to my comment today in your post about fonts 😄

Out of curiosity, did you ever find a solution for removing the DSIG data?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I have used the top suggestion python tool "fonttools" just to find that the font had an empty dsig table.

There also didn't seem to be any other identifying infos in the file.

But I am still unsure on where I could upload the files to make it easily findable and available to others.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I've seen fonts on all kinds of filesharing sites like Mediafire etc. But archive.org feels like a good bet for some kind of longevity. As for making it findable, I'm afraid I can't think of any advice.