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Comment by eneveu | Hacker News Reader

Vitesse looks great. I might be interested in using it for my slide decks, too.

I'm wondering about the licensing model, though... When I go to buy it, pricing depends on the number of CPUS. If I were to buy this font and use it in a slide deck, could I publish it after the conference?

In their FAQ, they say:

Our end-user font licenses allow only the production of Workflow PDFs, not Public PDFs. For organizations that need to circulate PDFs more widely, we offer an Embedding License as a supplemental product. For more information, please contact our sales office at info@typography.com.

http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php?faqID=16#Faq_16

Font licensing seems complicated. I just want a font that I can use to produce beautiful slides, display them on a screen in front of a large audience, and print them / share them after the talk.

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You can't share the font software with your audience, and since the only good way to share a slide deck with an audience is PDF (otherwise you'd literally have to share the font itself alongside the deck), and PDF embeds the font, you can't share a basic PDF either.

So, couple things:

(a) You can just not share the deck at all. That's my strategy. Slide decks suck. Sharing them also dilutes the value of your talk; a single talk can be given more than once, as long as you don't publish it.

(b) You can ignore the license. Many other people do that. You are unlikely to get burned by the H&FJ police for doing that. One imagines H&FJ is much more concerns about agencies and big companies accidentally publishing their whole font library in their professional PDFs.

(c) You can, instead of designing your talk in Keynote, design it in Illustrator (bonus: Illustrator is way better), slice the slides up on artboards, convert the type into outlines (a 1-click operation in AI), export them to individual PDFs, pull them into Keynote, and share that.

What about exporting the Keynote to JPGs, and then putting the JPGs into a new Keynote and exporting as PDF?

Similar difficulty as AI, but lower quality result.

If I'm going to spend a couple hundred bucks on a typeface, I'm not going to share it in JPG format.

I really think the best option is just not sharing slides. Your talk is your talk, not your visual aids.

You can export as PNG as well.

Acrobat allows you to embed a subset of the font in the PDF. For a large enough document, most of the glyphs end up embedded anyway, but at least there's no packaged font file that can be installed from the PDF.

I'm pretty sure you're still violating their license by embedding a subset of the glyphs. You're not allowed to embed them at all. If you're going to share documents with HF&J fonts, make sure they've been converted to dumb outlines.

Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. I think the best strategy for me is option (c).

I agree that slide decks suck as a sharing medium (unless you go to the trouble of adding "notes" under each slide, and share that, but then you're better off sharing a different document). Martin Fowler puts it very well in this post: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/Slideument.html

I can see how sharing a slide deck would dilute the value of a talk. At the same time, sharing my slides lets me reach more people. They might learn more by watching the talk, but it's a trade-off.

There's also the question of the legality of sharing these slides on websites such as InfoQ or Parleys, where the slides are synchronized with the video. But I guess option (c) could work for these.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic... http://www.parleys.com/#st=5&id=2103&sl=2

One thing to note is that converting to outlines will essentially change the text to an 'image'. So it's like looking at a jpeg of text - it won't be able to be highlighted, copied etc. (I'm sure there was a better way to word that, but the terminology escapes me)

Given how it's a slide deck, this probably isn't a big deal for distribution. But if it's important to you, I'm sure you can OCR the final product, and that wouldn't end up embedding the fonts. Unfortunately that's sort of a roundabout process.

Good point about not being able to copy/paste the final text.

I don't understand why I should OCR the final output, though, since I already have access to the "raw" text. If I were to OCR it and generate a new PDF, I'm back to square one, since I'd need to specify a font. Unless you meant that some people might want to OCR my public PDF to access the underlying text, since it only contains images?

In the end, I guess I'll simply use a font with a more permissive licence (free or commercial).

It's true that you can't treat the type as text anymore (if you can select it, it's probably not OK to share the file), but, importantly, you can scale it to any size with perfect fidelity. That's what you don't get in any process involving round-tripping through a JPG.

This is surely an annoying process bound to put anyone off of commercial typography... unless you're already typesetting your presentations in Illustrator. Which, admittedly, I haven't been doing. But now that I think about it: I do a lot of stuff in Illustrator, and Illustrator is so. much. better. than Keynote.

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