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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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