Why some fonts are archival

Most of the Kurdish fonts still in circulation were made between roughly 2003 and 2009 — drawn by hand on machines that no longer exist, passed between designers on discs and email attachments, renamed and re-uploaded until nobody could say where any of them came from.

Almost none of them carry a licence. Not because their makers withheld one, but because in that time and place nobody asked for one. A font was something you made so people could write Kurdish on a computer, and then you gave it away.

So the files that survive are copies of copies. Some exist in two or three places on the whole internet. When the last of those goes offline, that typeface is gone — and with it a piece of how Kurdish looked in print for a generation.

A font marked Archival is one we chose to preserve while its rights remain unresolved. We hold no licence document for it, and we say so — on the font's own page, on every card it appears on, and in the file you download.

It is not a claim that the font is free to use. We assert no licence for it anywhere, including in the machine-readable data search engines read. If you are planning to use one commercially, check with the author first.

Everything else on the site is unaffected: a font badged Verified open, Permission on file, or External carries exactly the licence status it says it does. Archival is a narrow exception, applied deliberately, and labelled every single time.

We never claim a licence we cannot back up. That rule has not moved, and it is the reason this badge exists at all — the alternative to labelling a font honestly is not labelling it, and the alternative to that is not having it.

We do not sell fonts, take commission on them, or run a marketplace. Nothing here earns money from anyone else's work. The site is free, ad-light by design, and paid for by donations.

And nothing is preserved against its author's wishes. One message from a rights holder takes a font down — no lawyer, no form, no argument.

Write to us and it comes down. We will not ask you to prove ownership before acting, and we will not put it back unless you tell us to.

If you would rather it stayed — many designers do, once they see it credited — we can mark it Permission on file instead, with your name on it and a link wherever you would like one to point.

Either way, the decision is yours. Use the report link on any font page, or write to us directly.