CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cssfonts
Mike Sav
Mike Sav

Reputation: 15291

When a site uses @font-face is that font stored locally?

Here's something that has been bugging me... I am currently creating an application for an international corporation (naturally I won't name them) and they use a specific non standard font for promotional material. I've asked them to supply this so I can use it in my application and they're taking forever to get back to me (I asked weeks ago and a deadline is pending). I've noticed on all of their websites they use this same font and incorporate it using the @font-face feature.

Now the sneaky part of me wondered could I take the font their using within the @font-face and install it on my machine so I could finish my work. However then the worried part of me remembered that I have used @font-face for other clients and naturally there are distribution issues with such fonts (they're property of the client and not for public use). I really wouldn't want people to be able to install or distribute these.

Is it possible for someone to take the font's I've used for previous site when incorporating @font-face. If these are available to visitors of my sites can I prevent their download?

Perhaps this is something I should lose sleep over...

Upvotes: 2

Views: 117

Answers (2)

T. Junghans
T. Junghans

Reputation: 11683

As kishu27 mentioned in his answer (+1 from me), your @font-face fonts are free for the taking (not free to use, depending on licence) an here's a source to back that up:

Although it is now technically possible to embed almost any font inside a web page, it is important to remember that if you use a commercial font for this purpose, you must have a license to do this. Since putting a font on a website will allow anyone on the Web to download it, a lot of font foundries currently do not allow their fonts to be used for web page embedding. It is for this reason that the browser vendors have been reluctant to implement this technology into their products until recently (font embedding is part of the CSS2 specification, which has been around since 1998

Source: http://www.useragentman.com/blog/2009/09/20/font-face-in-depth/

Upvotes: 2

kishu27
kishu27

Reputation: 3120

Your worry should be "are these font files accessible and downloadable over http?"

The answer is yes. A web developer can open your CSS file, look at the URL/Filename and download the files to reuse. And I don't believe there's much you could do about stopping the downloads for reuse.

Upvotes: 1

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