Font provenance

[William]

I have been having a look at a thread in the archives of the Unicode mailing list and was looking at the following post.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicod ... /0002.html

The guest user name and password for access to the archives are available on the following page.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/

I saw the following sentence.

It's more difficult than you may imagine to get strangers to install fonts.

Now that sentence is in that post in a particular context, yet the sentence got me thinking.

I often post links to my own fonts both here and elsewhere, including in our own family webspace.

I have been imagining that some people install my fonts and try them out, yet now I am wondering whether the perceived danger of installing a font obtained from a web link means that, in practice, very few people (maybe nobody?) would take the risk that it is thought might exist.

I have for a long time thought that companies might well be unwilling to use my fonts simply because there is no formal written licence from a business entity. So I have made some attempts, thus far unsuccessful, to have my fonts included on a disc for a desktop publishing package specifically so that the fonts would have a licence from a business entity with them.

I am wondering what exactly is the situation and am wondering whether it might be a good idea to suggest in the FontCreator - Requests and Enhancements forum that High-Logic please consider initiating a service, for a fee, whereby a font producer may send in a font by email to High-Logic, High-Logic would look it over, verify it and test it and then make it available, perhaps on the web, perhaps on a CD, perhaps by a secure download facility, so that the font has the provenance of having been supplied by High-Logic on the basis of having been tested for safety.

Any ideas?

William Overington

1 November 2007