All caps italic font

FontCreator - Font Editor FontCreator - Discussion
1

Recently I’ve become involved in creating epub ebooks. Mostly I’ve been working on making epubs of very old (late 1700s, early 1800s) science books, and occasionally I need to embed one or more fonts to emulate some of the old book text. Recently I found I need both all-caps regular and all-caps italic fonts (the epub reader won’t allow conversion of the all-caps regular to italic but rather requires a separate all-caps italic if the all-caps text should be in italic).

I haven’t been able to find a free italic all-caps font for embedding - when embedded the font is fully available to anyone reading the epub if the reader understands about the epub format. For this reason I can’t purchase a commercial font for embedding. What I’ve thought about is trying using Font Creator to alter an italic font from Southern Software (SSI) to create my own all-caps italic font because that company is out of business and their fonts seem to be widespread as free fonts on the internet.

My two questions are
1 Should I worry about the ethical issues involved in using SSI fonts?

  1. If so, does anyone know of a free all caps italic font with matching all caps regular font that might be available for download? If not, then if the majority of Font Creator forum participants think it’s ok to use SSI fonts for embedding, I can try to alter an SSI italic font to create an italic all-cap font using Font Creator.

Please give me your opinions.
Bob

2

SSI software apparently went out of business because they were sued by Adobe for copyright infringement, so using SSI fonts will put you in the same position if they are just forged copies of Adobe fonts.

Look for fonts released under GNU license that you can modify to suit your own needs.

Perhaps the IM Fell Fonts are the kind of thing you’re looking for. If not, have a trawl around Dafonts or other good free font sites.

3

I’ll search further, but I must say that free italic small cap fonts seem to be very scarce, although they do exist in commercial font families that are quite expensive and could not legally be embedded in an epub anyway. Actually for SSI, the suit was about a single font that Adobe documented was too similar to their own font to be independently derived. I’ve thought about this for some time, and often wondered if all the SSI fonts are affected or only the one Adobe listed in the suit - never been able to get a legally verifiable answer. If all the SSI fonts are affected by the suit, then why are there so many free SSI fonts on the internet that Adobe does not seem to worry about?

Anyway, I’d rather use a GNU font, so I’ll search more intensively.
Bob