What the licence allows

Most fonts here are under an open licence. Usually that is the SIL Open Font License, but Apache-2.0, CC0-1.0, CC-BY-4.0 and UFL-1.0 are published here too. All of them let you use the font for anything — personal work, client work, commercial work — with no fee and no permission to ask for. There is no separate licence to buy for a bigger print run or a busier website.

They also let you embed. You can put the font in a PDF, ship it inside a mobile app, bundle it with a desktop program, and serve it from your own web server. Embedding is one of the things these licences were written to allow, not an edge case somebody tolerates.

And they let you change the font and pass your version on. You can open it, add glyphs, fix the joining, rebuild the whole thing and redistribute the result. That right is the reason a Kurdish font with a missing ڵ can be repaired by anyone rather than waiting on its original designer.

Keep the licence file with the font. Wherever the font goes — into a code repository, into a client handover, into a zip you send a printer — the OFL text travels with it. This is the obligation people break most often, and it is the easiest one to meet.

If you modify the font and it declares a Reserved Font Name, rename your version. The reserved name, where there is one, is named in the copyright line of the licence file, so check that line before you assume either way: where a name is reserved your modified version must go out under a different family name, and where the font reserves none you may modify it and keep the name. Your fix is yours; the original designer's name stays attached to what they actually drew.

You may not sell an OFL font on its own. You can charge for the poster, the app, the website, the book, or the design work that uses it — the restriction is on selling the font file itself as the product. All three of these obligations are the OFL's, not every open licence's: a CC0-1.0 font asks nothing of you at all, and Apache-2.0 and CC-BY-4.0 set their own terms and do allow standalone sale. Which one you are under is stated on the font's page — read the canonical licence text linked there rather than assuming these three rules apply.

The download button gives you the original file exactly as it arrived, unmodified. Where the original archive came with a licence file, that file travels in the zip alongside the fonts; where it did not — a bare .ttf, say — there is no licence file to carry, and none appears. What is always in the zip is ABOUT.txt, which repeats the copyright and the licence line recorded in the font's own metadata. We do not re-subset, re-hint or rename the file you take away — if the designer's version has a quirk in it, you get the quirk.

The WOFF2 files are a different thing. They are derived assets, built from the sanitized copy our pipeline rebuilds with fontTools rather than from the original you download, and they exist so a font page loads quickly and a preview is honest. We never offer them as a download. Treat them as a convenience for the site, not as a master file you are meant to take away.

And not everything published here is ours to serve. The external bucket covers two cases: fonts whose author lets us list and preview them but not host the file, where the button sends you to the author, and commercial fonts listed for discovery, where the button sends you to where you buy it. In both cases the author's own terms govern, and ours do not. For everything else — archiving, checking a licence, handing a font to a foundry or a printer — use the download rather than the preview file. Then read the licence itself: what the zip carries is a copy, and some of the copies we shipped early were cut short, so the text that governs is the canonical licence linked from the font's own page. Go and read that one; this guide is only a summary of it.

Permission on file means the designer gave us written permission to publish the font, and we hold that permission on record. That permission covers our hosting of it; it is not a licence handed on to you when you download the file. What you may do is what the font's own terms say, and each font page states them in a permission grid — redistribution, webfont use, modification, commercial use — read from the licence record we triaged. Check that grid rather than assuming the freedoms an open licence would have given you.

Licence unverified means we published the font on staff judgement with no licence evidence at all. We host it and you can download it like any other, but the page says so in plain words, and we make no licence claim about it in the structured data that search engines read. Treat it as unresolved for commercial work: use it in a sketch, not in something you sell.

A font whose licence is unknown or quarantined is never published here at all, and that is a database constraint rather than an interface choice — you will not find such a font in the catalog or in search. What we cannot promise you is silence at an address someone already holds: our file URLs are content-addressed, and a CDN can keep serving a copy it cached earlier until we purge the edge explicitly, which is a separate step.

For desktop work — print, posters, documents, design files — an open licence covers you, including handing the font to a print shop as part of the job. For the web, self-host the file you downloaded, converting it to WOFF2 yourself if you want one; whatever licence text came with the font goes on your server too. For apps, embedding is allowed under an open licence, and app stores generally want you to be able to show that.

The rules change with the status, not with the medium. A font marked permission on file may be fine to display on a page we host and not fine to ship inside your product, because the permission we hold covers our publishing of it — the permission grid on the font page is where you check what you may do with it. An external font is governed entirely by its author's own licence, wherever that lives — and if it is a commercial listing, by the terms you accept when you buy it. When the status is anything other than an open licence, the safe assumption is that you need permission of your own.

Ask when the money is real. If the font is going onto packaging, into a product you sell, or into a logo you will register, write to the designer, or write to us and we will tell you exactly what evidence we hold. A short email now is cheaper than a redraw later.