Decades of Font Build-Up: License Issues

I've been "collecting" typefaces since the days when you could buy 5.25" diskettes with dozens of Bitstream*-compatible, PostScript, and other shareware faces for a couple of dollars. (It's more of a hoard than a collection...)  While a number of these have been jettisoned along the way for various reasons, a recent dive into the rabbit hole of "free" online font repositories (1001 Fonts, DA Font, etc.) suggests that I may still have a bunch of these either installed or in archived directories, without any attached license information. Since most cheap and free fonts in the 1990s were either bitmapped, poorly-designed, or cheap knockoffs of better-known faces, and most of us used those faces for personal, or small-distribution hard-copy newsletters, it was unusual for any of us to come to the negative attention of the rights owners (and even more unusual for the rights owners to do anything about it).

Times have changed. If I'm going to make a design "public" — either by putting an image of it (or a photograph of my finished product) on this blog, posting it to a design community (such as Behance, Dribble, or Design Bundles Community) or social medium (such as Pinterest), or allowing it to be searchable on Cricut Design Space — I have to mind my Ps, Qs, and alternate character sets, making sure that any resources I use are under the terms of the rights owner's license, and that I tag the designer, the rights owner, the place I found the resource, and (if a separate entity), the place from which I acquired the license.

This is not always as easy as it looks, and I don't always succeed at this part of my task. The proliferation of "old fonts" — both online and in my personal hoard — doesn't make it any easier.

Looking at the information on relatively recent faces on places like DA Fonts and 1001 Fonts state that those faces are "demo" versions of typefaces that the authors are currently selling on sites like Creative Fabrica and Creative Market. Great! I can play with the face, and if I need it for something beyond the free site's license, I can look up the face and license it appropriately.

Other faces have information on the brand-name foundry from which they came. While a handful of these faces are from current companies such as Adobe and Monotype, many more are from once-big names that have since been acquired by other big names (Bitstream was acquired by Monotype in 2012) or have ceased operation (such as Casady & Greene). So far, I've not been able to find the current owners of Casady & Greene's catalog.

The download page notices for many of the oldest fonts don't include any license information other than "contact the author" about licensing terms or license upgrades. Sometimes there is a link, sometimes a Readme file, and sometimes nothing at all. Unfortunately, a lot of contact information in these Readme files is out-of-date (questionable Compuserve addresses, defunct websites, etc.). Trying to contact those designers could require significant research on the user's part, as well as hoping that the license enquiry email would not be thrown out as spam.

DA Fonts, 1001 Fonts, and their ilk have been around for decades. Like me, I suspect they scraped up typefaces wherever they could find them, and have a back catalog of fonts and faces that they haven't had the time, manpower, or inclination to curate. Unfortunately that leaves them in the category of caveat emptor where type selection options for public-facing designs are concerned.

Obviously, we all have the option to not-use typefaces of questionable licensing when creating something we might want to post or sell. Personally, I need to take the time to curate my catalog and archive anything for which I don't have clear license information (or at least clear licensor information). And if you ever created shareware, donationware, or other freely-available type, you might want to check these "all the free fonts you can download" sites to make sure that anything of yours posted there has your current contact information and licensing terms.

More on Non-Western Alphabets, Bar Mitzvah T-Shirts

After talking with an Observant Jewish friend, I got the idea for a design I felt might be a bit more appropriate for a Bar Mitzvah t-shirt.

Design Sketch

Jewish men tend to have strong memories of the parshah (weekly Torah and Haftorah (Prophets) readings) they were required to learn for the public synagogue performance that defines most modern B'nai Mitzvah (Bar Mitzvahs). The readings are tied to specific weeks of the Jewish calendar. I came up with the graphic idea of a Torah scroll, open for reading, with the Bar (or Bat) Mitzvah's Jewish name, along with the parshah and date (intended to be written in Hebrew). I used "David ben Avraham" as a generic male name, and since my Hebrew and Jewish learning isn't that great and I wasn't at home when sketching, I chose the parshah "Vayyera" as one whose name I remembered, sketching it in English to be customized in Hebrew for any particular Bar Mitzvah.

Once I got home, I used a couple of brush markers to ink the outlines of the scroll, imported it into my graphics programs, and uploaded it into Design Space.

Note that the lines have been thickened, and the rollers colored in a single (flat) brown to make them easier to cut and weed. (I have since added a white underlayer for the parchment.)

Following the method I outlined in my previous post, I added my sample Bar Mitzvah boy's name and the words "Bar Mitzvah" in Photoshop and curved the text appropriately:

Vertical Text Typing Reversal

The problem came when I started trying to insert the vertical text in Photoshop: because I forgot to check the "switch orientation" icon, the letters were jumbled together, and when I started separating them by putting each on a separate line, they disappeared... and then they appeared, in reverse order. Even when I copied my text into vertical orientation, they were in reverse order... until I typed in my text into Character Map as it normally read.

So, if you are looking to include vertical text in a right-to-left language, you will need to remember to not reverse the order of your letters, with a notable exception:

"Ki Tetze"

I changed my sample parshah from "Vayyera" to "Ki Tetze" (כִּי־תֵצֵא‬) when I started blocking out my text. My main reason for this was a shorter name. That said, it's two words, and the last letter (yad) of the first word doesn't go all the way down to the baseline. 

Because I was having trouble getting vertical text in Photoshop, I selected a system font with Hebrew characters and copied my text into Design Space. At first, the typeface I'd originally chosen didn't show up in my system fonts there, but that was because I'd forgotten to refresh the tab to refresh my system fonts index.

Regardless of whether I entered text in Photoshop, Illustrator, or Design Space, I had to play around with line spacing to get the letters to appear as cohesive words, and with the size of my text box to make sure all those letters appeared in the text object. That said, the vertical orientation — and what I could do with it — varied from program to program.

Slanted Text

Because Design Space keeps each text block as a separately editable, but not warpable, object, rotating the text was sufficient to get it to align with the torah scroll. That said, the amount of difference in line spaces, along with the common use of the character yad as a vowel, required me to put "Ki" (kaf-yad) on a single line, with "Tetze" following as a separate vertically-aligned word.

Both Photoshop and Illustrator have better line spacing, however, keeping my letters as text causes them to handle text rotation differently from Design Space, as well as differently from each other.

Since Design Space treats each text object as a single, image-like object, using the rotation handle to rotate my vertical text ends up perfectly aligned to my slanted rolled parchment, even though each letter is on a separate line. If I place each letter on a separate line in Illustrator, rotating my object will cause my letters remain upright, but indent each line to follow the object's slant. 

Both Illustrator and Photoshop have text-orientation toggles that let you type normally, but format your letters vertically. In CS4, which is the (admittedly-ancient) version of Creative Suite I'm working with, the toggle is under the "Type" menu in Illustrator. In Photoshop, with the text tool selected, it's a small "T" with vertical and horizontal arrows that appears just to the left of the typeface selector on the text ribbon. That said, I had to rasterize my vertical text in Photoshop — making it ineditable — before I could rotate it. 

Finding New Faces

Being that I'm looking at doing some more artistic work with Hebrew text, I looked for and installed several dozen different free Hebrew typefaces I found at sources such as WebToolHub, FontSpace, Free Hebrew Font, AlefAlefAlef and the Open Siddur Project. I was looking primarily for a couple of faces in Hebrew "script", of which I had none in my collection, as well as some variations in display fonts that would make for interesting (and potentially marketable) items.

These showed up nicely in Photoshop and Illustrator as expected, but didn't show up in Design Space until I saved my project and reloaded the tab.

Dates?

I'm sufficiently unfamiliar with the system of using Hebrew letters for numbers that it's going to take some more work before I'm able to complete the left-hand scroll with a reasonable sample Hebrew date.