Fonts: embedding, redistribution, and attribution

Fonts are the one category where the obligation does not attach to what your players see. It attaches to the font file you ship. That is why 19 of the font entries in this catalog set attribution_required: false while still carrying a real duty, and why this page exists separately from licenses.md.

What attribution_required means on a font entry

In this catalog the field answers one question: must you credit the author somewhere in your product? For SIL OFL fonts the answer is no, so the field is false.

It does not mean you owe nothing. OFL obliges you to keep the copyright notice and the licence text with the font files you redistribute, including the copies embedded in a game build. That is a notice obligation, not a credit obligation. A credits screen does not satisfy it and is not required by it.

If you filter this catalog by "No attribution" you will get OFL fonts. That filter is telling you there is no credit line to write. It is not telling you the licence file can be dropped.

What you actually owe when shipping an OFL font

1. Ship OFL.txt (or the licence text the foundry supplied) with the build. A third-party-licences.txt next to the executable, or inside the package, is the normal way. Godot: put it in the exported .pck or alongside it. Unity and Unreal: include it in the licences or credits file you already generate for third-party code.
2. Keep the copyright notice intact. Do not strip the metadata out of the .ttf.
3. Do not sell the font on its own. Bundling it inside a game is fine; putting it in an asset pack you sell as fonts is not.
4. If you modify the font, respect the Reserved Font Name. Any RFN declared in the licence header cannot appear in the name of your modified version. Rename the family before you ship a patched or subsetted-and-renamed build.

Subsetting, hinting changes, and converting to another format are all permitted. They are modifications, so the licence and notice travel with the result, and the RFN rule applies if the original declared one.

Embedding is not redistribution of a font product

The distinction that trips people up: embedding a font in a game binary is allowed under OFL, and always has been. What OFL forbids is releasing the font files by themselves under a different name or for sale. Shipping a .pck that happens to contain a .ttf is embedding. Uploading that .ttf to a font site is redistribution.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• Encrypted or packed builds are fine. OFL does not require the font to stay extractable, unlike the share-alike reasoning that applies to CC-BY-SA art.
• A web build that serves the font as a separate file over HTTP is distributing the font file. Keep the licence reachable; a link in your credits page is enough.

CC0 fonts

ggbotnet-fonts-cc0 and similar CC0 releases owe nothing at all: no notice, no credit, no RFN. They are the lowest-friction option if you do not want to maintain a notices file. This is the only font licence in the catalog where dropping the licence text is safe.

Aggregators and the traps

• Google Fonts is not a licence. Almost every family there is OFL, a few are Apache-2.0, and the terms are per family. Check the family page, not the site.
• "Free for personal use" is the most common trap on free-font sites. It is not a commercial grant and it is not in this catalog.
• Webfont-only EULAs grant @font-face use and nothing else. A game binary is not a web page; embedding under a webfont-only licence is outside the grant.
• Fontshare is listed as needs-review for this reason: it mixes its own itf_ffl terms with OFL and the terms page is not readable as plain text.
• Open Foundry is a display index. Download from the upstream foundry so you get the real OFL.txt with the family.

Quick reference

Related

• licenses.md for the cross-category cheat sheet
• high-risk.md for sources to avoid entirely
• Catalog: catalog/fonts/