In the thread http://www.serif.com/forum/MessageCreate.asp?Thread=22597 is the following.
PP honours the Adobe standard.
Not completely. Adobe respects embedding restrictions if a font doesn’t allow it. PP has no such qualms.
The PP to which reference is made is PagePlus, Serif’s desktop publishing package, which, in recent versions, has pdf producing capabilities.
An interesting item which arises is that I have produced pdfs using my own fonts using PagePlus 9 and now realize that I have implicity used that as a test that my fonts are correctly flagged so that they can be embedded in pdfs. As it now appears that that test of a font’s embedding capabilities may not be a good test, how should the flags of a font be set so that the font can be embedded in a pdf? I can then start checking my fonts and, if necessary, start changing the flags.
I have started to look at this and read the notes obtainable from FontCreator using Format | Settings… | General | Edit … | Help and think that the default setting which FontCreator supplies is the one I want, so that part of the issue seems solved.
However, the rules quoted seem rather strange in that the following is included.
Installable embedding
Fonts that have none of the flags set are installable embedding fonts. Fonts with this setting indicate that they may be embedded and permanently installed on the remote system by an application. The user of the remote system acquires the identical rights, obligations and licenses for that font as the original purchaser of the font, and is subject to the same end-user license agreement, copyright, design patent, and/or trademark as was the original purchaser.
It appears that this means that saying nothing is regarded as giving all! That seems very strange. I wonder how that would go in the courts! Perhaps that would be a good hypothetical case for a student Intellectual Property Rights lawyers moot.
Another interesting point is as follows.
For compatibility purposes, most vendors granting Editable embedding rights are also setting the Preview & Print flag. This will permit an application that only supports Preview & Print embedding to detect that font embedding is allowed.
I am wondering whether to implement that. It looks like a good idea. Are there any packages which would misinterpret two flags set as indicating the font was licensed differently than intended?
William Overington