I admit this is something I do not know much about, not something I had thought of previously to going all open source, so my question might make sense, or it might not.
So, I’m currently writing a novel and, thus, making heavy use of text processors. Since I switched to Debian and to LibreOffice as well, I also decided to change my novel document format from Transitional OOXML to ODT moved by philosophy and belief in open standards. Yes, I was previously writing it on M. Word so that was the default doc format and my font was Calibri for most of the text. This was not a deliberate decision and was also not intended to be final, but something I would think about later on.
Well, now it is later on, and what’s sparked my curiosity has been all this change I’ve been doing. So, when I opened LibreOffice for the first time and saw ‘Liberation Self’ as the default font, it got thinking: are font letters open/free/libre, in the sense open source apps and formats are? Are they owned to some capacity by someone, or is it safe to assume that most fonts bundled with text editors have an open licence? If not, is there something I should be wary about this if I care about open standards?
Thank you in advance for any insight you can provide :)
most fonts are very much not free, but in a “rights” sense rather than in a “standards” sense. since fonts are works of art rather than technical designs, open source licenses don’t really apply. when printing a book you typically select a font and buy a license for that font that only allows you to use it, not modify it.
in fact, most of the web is built with proprietary fonts that keep being used in spite of their licenses because the alternative would break everything.
That sounds actually huge and was not at all aware of it. Definitely will be looking into using open/libre ones whenever possible.
i’d say using proprietary fonts is okay. the format itself is open, paying artists is always good, and there are some gorgeous fonts out there.