Re: Skyfonts

[Alexander Kobel]

On 2016-11-07 13:21, Andrew Bernard wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> A lot of very useful input and food for thought here. I confess I am not an
> expert on the legal issues, [...]
> I had assumed that pulling the fonts out of a PDF in the case of SkyFonts
> amounted to reverse engineering and was therefore barred. [...]

Hi Andrew,

I'm not an expert for the legal implications, either. My understanding 
of Skyfonts (or Typekit) is that you "rent" the right to use fonts 
within the duration of the contract to design documents adhering to the 
terms (e.g., webfonts might be allowed or not), but you are free to keep 
and distribute documents created within that period of time. So I 
personally would have no moral issues with extracting a font to make it 
usable with the application of my choice - if I can use it via Finale 
and Word, why shouldn't I be able to use it with Lilypond or Latex to 
achieve the same net effect as far as the font foundry is concerned. But 
neither do I have any moral issues with scanning a sheet of music I 
bought as a hardcopy, stow it away in my archive, and use the scans as 
digital sheet notes (obviously, as long as I don't hand them over to 
others, or use the same edition multiple times simultaneously). Or copy 
a page to avoid nasty page turns. Still, it is at least highly disputed 
whether this is allowed in Germany, if not outright forbidden.

For practical matters: I'm not aware of any tool that offers convenient 
extraction of PDF-embedded fonts, so I second your doubts about the 
practicality there. But googling for a few seconds led me to 
http://www.advogato.org/person/yosch/diary/150.html, where I read 
between the lines that the synchronized fonts are stored in 
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\skyfont-google\ on Windows. The 
folder should be hidden, so you have to check the option to reveal 
hidden files. Since I have no access to Skyfonts and/or a Windows 
machine, I can't verify - but maybe you can. I assume the fonts there 
are not encrypted, since they seem to be usable in default applications, 
but that maybe their names are mangled?


HTH,
Alexander