[Scribus] Legality of Font Embedding

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2005-04-29 at 19:36 -0700, frank gaude' wrote:
> Here's the way I see it regarding Acrobat: version 6 and 7 are very 
> strict when it comes to permitting the embedding of fonts based upon the 
> tags that are within the font files themselves. There are four tags that 
> tell Acrobat 6 or 7 how to handle the fonts: everything is allowed 
> (installable mode0, embedding of this font is not allowed, only printing 
> and previewing of the document is allowed (read only), and editing of 
> the document is allowed. These are the four tags that FontLab is capable 
> of placing onto a font.

As a publisher, I find these endlessly annoying - especially those flags
that prevent re-embedding, since one cannot go from PDF->EPS, include
that EPS in a larger document, then convert that back to PDF. I'm always
having to go back to clients and ask them to fix their document / use
another font (though there are ways around that where the client can't
fix the problem properly).

[snip]

> So, as long as Scribus uses an Acrobat 5 to do the embedding all seems 
> to be okay in turns of fonts, but the legality of it all depends on what 
> the font company has to say about it.

Scribus doesn't use Acrobat at all, and it doesn't go via an
intermediate PostScript stage when making PDF. It creates PDF directly
using code in Scribus its self. Thus it's up to Scribus to ensure that
it respects the font embedding flags. I'm not sure whether that is
currently implemented, or what the various legalities involved are.

-- 
Craig Ringer