In 2009 NBC was sued by Font Bureau alleging that the broadcaster did not secure sufficient rights for fonts used in several advertising campaigns for their shows. Font Bureau claims that in some instances NBC paid for one copy of the fonts then copied them to many computers, and in another case, the fonts were not licensed at all. Font Bureau asked for $2 million for the infraction.

This is only one example of what can happen when font license agreements are not closely monitored.

Understand Font License Terms Before You Purchase

Fonts are software and their use is subject to restrictions that are similar to software licenses. When you purchase a font, you do not own it; just as in a software application, you are allowed to use the font as long as your comply with the font vendors’ licensing terms.

First, you need to be aware of the terms of your licenses. Font vendors have different terms in their license agreement. For example, Adobe Systems allows for the subset embedding of fonts in pdf documents, but Emigre only permits this only if you purchase an extension to the original font license.

For this reason, before purchasing a font, you should always examine the terms its license and make sure you can comply with its restrictions in your workflow.

Many Free Fonts Have License Restrictions

Many sites on the Web offer so-called “free” fonts. If you examine their license terms closely, you’ll often find that many of these fonts are free for personal use, but require you to purchase a license if you use the fonts for commercial purposes.

For example, one small foundry requires commercial-use customers to send the foundry copies of documents in which the font is used, and then pay the foundry a fair-charge amount for the use. Very few commercial organizations could use such a font under such license terms; the legal fees required to review each use would dwarf the font license fees.

Make Sure Your Current Fonts Are in Compliance

Unless you have been carefully monitoring and enforcing font license compliance in your organization, chances are your font collection isn’t “yours.” It is likely be a mix of:

• Legally licensed fonts that could easily be installed on more devices than you have licensed
• Fonts introduced to your workflow by users who found and selected them for a design project
• Fonts legally purchased by single users, but that have spread across the organization
• Free fonts that people have downloaded off the Internet
• Fonts introduced and copied among machines because users thought they had the right to do so
. This commonly occurs when freelance designers assisting on projects bring their own font collection—which may or may not be properly licensed—into your organization to create their designs.

In short, your entire current font collection might need to be evaluated for license compliance.

Get Control of Your Financial and Legal Exposure

If you’re not tracking font usage in your organization, you could have significant financial and legal exposure. In a future posting, The Inside Scoop will show how you can use Insider products to get control of your fonts now.

For more information on how Insider can help you with enforcing license compliance and your 
other font management challenges, or for a free 30-day trial of Insider products, please visit
 www.insidersoftware.com or contact us.

Lots of New Features

FontAgent Pro TeamServer 5 includes:

• Even faster synchronization with networked client users
• Browser-based real-time reports that track font usage by machine or user
• WEBSIWYG, the browser-based online catalog that shows server-based fonts in their native typeface outlines
• An all-new industrial-strength, reliable, high-performance, Java-based architecture
• One-click installer for TeamServer and the J2EE environment

Comprehensive Font Management

Using the TeamServer and FontAgent Pro, you can control and manage fonts across your organization as you:

• Centralize and share fonts for consistency and control
• Install and remove fonts on user machines automatically
• Ensure font integrity and faithful rendering
• Enforce consistent font usage across all users and projects
• See stunning previews, slide shows and comparisons of your fonts
• Find fonts—locally and over the Internet—by properties or topic
• Print font books with full color control
• Administer the font server from any Mac or Windows connected client

Easy, Economical and Expandable

FontAgent Pro TeamServer is designed for everyone — no IT experience required! The five-user TeamServer is just $895 USD and the ten-user version is only $1295. It includes  FontAgent Pro client software for your users and you can add additional TeamServer users as you need them.

If you’d like to put TeamServer to work in your organization, let us know. We’re eager to work with you and your creative team.

There’s a lot of new features in FontAgent Pro Server 5…

• Documents manager that stores and displays font license information
• Even faster synchronization with networked client users
• Browser-based real-time reports that track font usage by machine or user
• WEBSIWYG, the browser-based online catalog that shows server-based fonts in their native typeface outlines and includes a shopping cart to enable requests of administrators or purchasing managers
• New, more robust Active Directory/Open Directory services
• One-click installer for FontAgent Pro Server and the J2EE environment

As always, the new server includes FontAgent Pro’s industry-leading font integrity manager, automatic font and set distribution, and administration of the server and fonts from any connected client.

With FontAgent Pro Server 5, users get the industry’s fastest, easiest solution for requesting and managing fonts. At the same time, IT and finance departments can track font purchases, minimize font license costs, and ensure desktop consistency across creative teams with industrial-strength font server they can depend on now and in the future.

For more information about the world’s most dependable, fastest, cost-effective and scalable font server, contact us. We’ll help you determine a configuration that’s right for you.

This latest FontAgent Pro release is available for immediate download here.

Unrivaled Auto-Activation Precision in Adobe CS 5.5 and Quark 9

Built on Insider’s unique FontSavant™ technology, the 4.2 release includes Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 and QuarkXPress 9 plug-ins that ensure FontAgent Pro always selects the right font for your documents—not just a close match or one that has the same name.

The updated plug-ins support both CS 5.5 and the recent Creative Suite 5.5.1 update, and are available for installation using the Install Plug-ins/Xtensions manager in the FontAgent Pro pull-down menu.

FontAgent Pro gives you full control over the auto-activation process. It detects subtle differences among fonts to deliver the most accurate font activation possible. When no installed fonts match one required by a document, it provides a list of alternate fonts in your collection—with a relevancy ranking that shows how closely they match the font your document requested—so you can choose the best font. You can also activate a preferred font format (e.g., Type 1, OpenType, TrueType) automatically.

Availability and Pricing

Release 4.2 of FontAgent Pro is free to users who have already licensed FontAgent Pro 4. The product retails for USD $49.95 for registered users of FontAgent Pro 3 and earlier, and is USD $99.95 for new purchasers. Cross-grades from qualifying competitive products are also available.

If you are running InDesign 5.5, you will need to restart the application so it can properly load the plug-in.

How did this happen? The current version of FontAgent Pro 4 (4.160) includes plug-ins for InDesign CS 5.5, but are no longer recognized in CS 5.5.1. According to Adobe, InDesign CS 5.5 incorrectly allowed the earlier version of the plug-ins to be recognized. You can read more about this here.

For more information on how Insider can help your font management challenges, or for a free 30-day trial of Insider products, please visit
 www.insidersoftware.com or contact us.

Installing the Plug-ins

If you don’t already have FontAgent Pro or want to move up to the latest version, download the software and documentation here.

After you have the software installed:

• Launch Font Agent Pro
• Select FontAgent Pro>Install Plug-ins/Xtensions from the menu bar
• Select the applications you wish to update (we recommend selecting all  the apps)
• Click Finish

Adobe Creative Suite CS5 applications will appear in the Setup Assistant as Creative Suite CS 5 applications.

Unique Technology that Ensures Correct Activation

Built on Insider’s unique FontSavant™ technology, the new release ensures that FontAgent Pro’s auto-activation manager always selects the right font in your documents—not just a close match or one that has the same name.

FontAgent Pro gives you full control over the font auto-activation process. It begins by detecting the most subtle differences among fonts to deliver the most accurate font activation possible. When no installed fonts match one required by a document, it provides a list of alternate fonts in your collection—with a relevancy ranking that shows how closely they match the font your document requested—so you can choose the best font. You can also activate a preferred font format (e.g., Type 1, OpenType, TrueType) automatically.

Availability and Pricing

Release 4.160 of FontAgent Pro is free to users who have already licensed FontAgent Pro 4. The product retails for $99.95 for new purchasers and is $49.95 for registered users of FontAgent Pro 3 and earlier. Cross-grades from qualifying competitive products are also available.

Simple Installation, Configuration and Administration

FontAgent Pro Server replication services are simple to set up. Installing the central or master server requires no special configuration, and installing a replicated or slave server requires an IP address or a dedicated domain name and authentication information. Once the servers are configured, the replication process happens at regular five-minute intervals automatically. The slave server is an exact mirror copy of the master and serves users on its local network.

To configure FontAgent Pro Server to be a master server you simply enter the replication license key you receive when you purchase a replication server license. You then point any slave servers to the master and ensure that you have access through any firewalls that might exist in your organization between the two servers. It’s that simple.

Network Performance Considerations

If the network connection between the master and slave servers is less than optimal, FontAgent Pro Server allows you to easily change the default size of the data packets it moves across your connection. By default, FontAgent Pro Server moves data in four-megabyte packets for fastest performance, but you can change the packet size to be as small as 256 kilobytes for slow network connections.

Automatic Directory Synchronization

FontAgent Pro Server replicates users, groups and other directory information automatically when replicated slave servers sync with the centrally maintained master server. So after setting up directory services links on the master with a few clicks, directory data synchronizes securely and automatically.

Failover Services Keep Users Connected

FontAgent Pro also provides failover services that allow end users to connect automatically to alternate servers when their primary font server is unavailable, so their workflow and font updates continue uninterrupted. Combined with FontAgent Pro’s server replication, these failover services make FontAgent Pro Server a clear choice in multi-server environments.

Easy Sailing after Setup

So that’s it. Once you’ve set up FontAgent Pro Server replication, all you need to do is maintain the master server and the rest of your font servers remain in sync automatically. It’s that simple… and that smart.

Get Control of Your Fonts Now

For more information on how Insider can help your font management challenges, or for a free 30-day trial of Insider products, please visit
 www.insidersoftware.com or contact us.

Support for Windows 7 Fonts
FontAgent Pro 4.1 provides full support for Windows 7 system fonts. With a click, you can optimize your Fonts Control Panel, leaving system fonts in place while moving your other fonts into your FontAgent Pro font library where you can view, search and activate them as you wish.

New Auto-Activation Plug-Ins for Adobe Creative Suite 5
The new release includes auto-activation plug-ins for Adobe CS5 that find, match and activate fonts as you open InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop documents.  So now, FontAgent Pro for Windows includes auto-activation plug-ins for CS2, 3, 4 and 5.

Improved Keyword Search
The V4.1 release also expands its unique and extensive keyword search functionality, adding hundreds of new keywords and topics as well as support for fonts from the Ascender library of Monotype Imaging.

Connectivity to FontAgent Pro Server
The new FontAgent Pro 4.1 for Windows adds scheduled FAP Server synchronization to its existing manual sync functionality, making it even easier for organizations to standardize fonts across user desktops.

Free Upgrade for Existing FontAgent Pro 4 Licensees!
Do you already have a license for FontAgent Pro 4 for Windows? Have a license key beginning “FAW4″?  If so, you can upgrade to FAP 4.1 for free.

For More Information or a Free Trial
To learn more about this release, to download and update your software, or to get a free trial of FontAgent Pro 4.1 for Windows, click here.

The scripts that come with FontAgent Pro work directly with FontAgent Pro, but you can add scripts that run other applications as well.

Below is a script that launches Smasher, Insider’s font and cache maintenance utility. If you would like to download the script click here. Unzip the attached file and place the script in the /Library/Application Support/FontAgent Pro/Scripts/ folder to get it to appear as Launch Smasher in the FontAgent Pro > Scripts menu.

set appFolder to (path to applications folder as Unicode text)
set afolder to appFolder & “Smasher”
tell application “Finder”
if exists folder afolder then
try
tell application “Smasher”
activate
end tell
end try
else
tell application “Finder”
activate
display dialog “You do not have Smasher installed. To learn more about Smasher and download a demo click \”Learn More.\”" buttons {“Cancel“, “Learn More“} default button 2
if the button returned of the result is “Learn More” then
set theURL to “open http://www.insidersoftware.com/SM.php”
do shell script theURL
else
– nothing happens
end if
end tell
end if
end tell

Note:  If you copy and paste the text into Script Editor, depending on the browser you are using, you may need to do a find-and-replace on the quotes to get them to be dumb quotes. ScriptEditor will see a smart quote as an unknown token and the script will not compile. You can view and edit the linked script after you download it if you wish.

This script is handy because when you start seeing symptoms of font cache corruption, it allows you to quickly launch Smasher from FontAgent Pro, where you can clear your caches and get back to your work. It is also a good idea to make sure you have Smasher’s cache clearing scheduled to run each time you start or shutdown your Mac.

When you run the script, Smasher launches and you can edit settings to clear your caches in any manner you wish. If you don’t have Smasher installed it  gives you an option to go to a web page where you can learn more about the product.

This script is offered as is and you may feel free to edit it in any way you wish. For example, you add scripts that launch other applications such as QuarkXPress or InDesign from within FontAgent Pro.

In future posts, we will talk more about using AppleScript to automate font-related workflows. Stay tuned to The Inside Scoop.

New Font Verification and Validation Engine
Smasher 2 includes an all-new font validation and verification engine identifies problem fonts and eliminates them before they can cause you and your favorite applications major aggravation.

Support for Adobe Creative Suite 5 Cache Clearing
This new version of Smasher includes new support for InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop CS5 application caches. Smasher 2 also continues to clear caches for earlier versions of the Adobe Creative Suite, as well as QuarkXpress, Microsoft Office applications, CUPS spool files and Mac OS X system caches—and it allows you to do so manually or on a regular, scheduled basis.

Expanded Font Preview Capabilities
Smasher 2 includes expanded font preview capabilities including the ability to define and display custom text strings at varying sizes, so you can see exactly how text will appear in your projects.

Simpler, Cleaner User Interface
Smasher’s updated interface makes it easier to access its many features. The main window, caches window and smash scheduler window have all been redesigned based on user testing to be simpler and more straightforward. Smasher 2 also includes a new look-and-feel with updated icons that are easier to view and recognize.

WYSIWYG Font Lists
Smasher now lists typefaces in their native outlines, so what you see is what you get—every time.

Archive Original Fonts
Smasher now gives you the ability to archive a copy of the original fonts into a zip file or to a disk image, making it fast and easy to back up your font collection.

Automatic Application Updater
Smasher 2 updates itself automatically when Insider releases a new version, freeing you from having to manually download new software and run its associated installer.

For More Information
To learn more about Smasher 2 or to get a free trial, visit www.insidersoftware.com.