[cairo] Font licenses and embedding

Kristian Høgsberg krh at bitplanet.net
Thu Aug 11 12:42:24 PDT 2005


Jon Smirl wrote:
> The issue of font licenses and font embedding has come up on the xorg
> list. How is this handled with the PS/PDF backend for Cairo? I may
> have GPL or commercial fonts on my system, how are the licenses dealt
> with when the font gets embedded into the PS file?

Cairo doesn't handle this, and it doesn't belong in cairo.  There is no 
way cairo can know if you're just creating a document for your own use, 
e.g. to print immediately or if you intend to distribute the PDF file.

> There needs to be some mechanism for the user to know what is going on
> with the licenses and font embedding. You don' t want to accidentally
> post a commercial font to the Internet or inadvertently GPL your
> document.

If such a mechanism is necessary, the authoring application should 
implement it.

Kristian



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