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How to pirate a font

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

  1. 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)
  2. How can I remove the DSIG and other metadata from the ttf file while keeping it usable?
  3. 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

figjam ,

The first and last font I downloaded was the Quake font.

AngryCommieKender ,

Marines we are at 5% force operational status

ElderReflections ,
@ElderReflections@kbin.social avatar

Fonttools includes a tool to convert TTF to XML and back again. Makes it easy to inspect and remove unwanted metadata

Deckweiss OP ,

Awesome, thank you! I’ll try that

Landmammals ,

What’s fun about that, is that fonts are copyrightable, but typefaces are not.

MadBob ,

Is that in a particular land or what? Could you give a source?

Landmammals ,

en.wikipedia.org/…/Intellectual_property_protecti…

Agent641 ,

Whats the difference?

hai ,
@hai@lemmy.ml avatar

Basically style vs the instructions that make up the font. It’s lead to a lot of rip offs (see: Helvetica vs. Arial).

PerogiBoi ,
@PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca avatar

This is how u pirate a font:

Google “fontname GitHub”

The end.

Deckweiss OP , (edited )

I did that and:

  1. The only file that is correct is only of the regular version, so there are a lot of variations missing - you wouldn’t be able to get the same files as by following the paid way. The upload is 8 years old and seems to be part of an opensource website.
  2. There is another upload from 4 years ago, where the files appear to be called by the same name, but it’s not the same font at all. Seems to be part of a website again, which shows a couple of fonts for comparison. Maybe they’ve put it there as a placeholder.

Thats why I wanted to ask how to safely upload them.

isles ,

Github is really a great piracy bro.

PerogiBoi ,
@PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca avatar

Yeah why not. Works in a pinch. I don’t recall where I said it was the most efficient or effective method though.

SquiffSquiff ,

Please excuse my lack of knowledge here. Am I under to understand from your post that software that you have purchased from another supplier will check from files that you have bought from this supplier and refuse to use them based on their attestation?

Evil_incarnate ,

If I have it right, it goes like this. I purchase the font package, the seller includes hidden in the files an identifier so they know it’s mine. I share the files across the seven seas. The seller keeps a lookout for their fonts being shared, and spots it in the wild, downloads it and finds out who’s it was.

SquiffSquiff ,

Oh no, I understood the watermarking concern. This sort of thing is famous with with Oscar screeners and electronic books. I was asking about OP’s suggestion that the font might be effectively withdrawn by a third party

Deckweiss OP ,

Like I mentioned in my post, I don’t really understand it, thats why I asked.

But I’ve read learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/…/dsig and to me it sounds like your OS for example (or any other software) could attempt to verify the validity of the DSIG of a font. If it works similarly to other types of signing, the certificate authority, in this case the creator of the font, could declare a font signed with a specific key invalid and your OS e.g. would then prohibit you from installing it.

But I may be completely wrong here. Maybe nobody is bothering with it, but since we live in DRM hell, I wnated to ask to make sure.

SquiffSquiff ,

Thanks for explaining. I guess this would be comparable to e.g. Blu-ray key revocation. I suppose it’s possible but I’m not sure how likely it is considering the potential downsides, e.g. legal liability, for anyone doing this, compared to I’m not sure what upsides where there’s no profit to be found and all costs sunk

killeronthecorner ,
@killeronthecorner@lemmy.world avatar

Isn’t this easily bypassed by modifying the “hidden” part

Kanzar ,

If you even know what the hidden part(s) is, is the problem.

AnAngryAlpaca , (edited )

Maybe is in the metadata as someone pointed out earlier, or it could be an otherwise unused ASCII char that looks different for each user who licensed it when printed out, sort of like a qr code as a single ASCII char.

Or it could be that they simply just check filename, file size and/or md5, all of which can be easily changed.

killeronthecorner ,
@killeronthecorner@lemmy.world avatar

Files have formats. Anything “hidden” here is destroyed by conversion to a different font format before redistribution.

There is no way of controlling this from the authors side without some sort of DRM.

gravitas_deficiency ,

Whatever you end up doing, make sure you don’t leave out the ARRRRRs

yokonzo ,

Well, if you really want to keep it you could drag it into a vector graphic editing software and trace each letter, make your own font set

WarmSoda ,

Side question, does anyone have suggestions for a decent free vector editing software? I’ve been meaning to just search for one for a long time but I always forget about it.

tonyn ,

I use inkscape for vector graphics editing. It’s free and open source, and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

yokonzo ,

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

WarmSoda ,

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

ProfessorProteus ,
@ProfessorProteus@lemmy.world avatar

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

yokonzo ,

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

an0nym0us ,
@an0nym0us@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    ProfessorProteus ,
    @ProfessorProteus@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    Deckweiss OP ,

    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.

    ProfessorProteus ,
    @ProfessorProteus@lemmy.world avatar

    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?

    Deckweiss OP ,

    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.

    ProfessorProteus ,
    @ProfessorProteus@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    cestvrai ,

    It’s a bit more barebones but I really like BoxySVG

    cuchilloc ,

    @remindme 2 weeks

    remindme Bot ,

    @cuchilloc Ok, I will remind you on Monday Feb 19, 2024 at 10:53 AM PST.

    jvrava9 ,
    @jvrava9@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    Didn’t know that the bot was ported to lemmy

    anguo ,

    Looks like it’s a mastodon bot.

    ThoGot ,

    @remindme 2 weeks

    remindme Bot ,

    @ThoGot Ok, I will remind you on Monday Feb 19, 2024 at 10:53 PM PST.

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