The other day I saw a comment saying that fonts are made complicated by turning them into programs, which you can legally protect as IP, is there any truth to that?
Roughly true. Rasterized fonts are typically not copyrightable. The font files, or as you suggest, programs, are.
If you see a font you think is cool, you can pretty much rip off the style without any real consequences. This is often why font licenses for print media are priced very differently than digital media where the font is redistributed.
To clarify fonts are not made complicated so they can legally pose as software. There are many real reasons why they are complicated. Yes they are licensed as software (they are sort of plugins) but its not related to the complicateness.
Comments
The other day I saw a comment saying that fonts are made complicated by turning them into programs, which you can legally protect as IP, is there any truth to that?
Roughly true. Rasterized fonts are typically not copyrightable. The font files, or as you suggest, programs, are.
If you see a font you think is cool, you can pretty much rip off the style without any real consequences. This is often why font licenses for print media are priced very differently than digital media where the font is redistributed.
To clarify fonts are not made complicated so they can legally pose as software. There are many real reasons why they are complicated. Yes they are licensed as software (they are sort of plugins) but its not related to the complicateness.
PostScript fonts exist and PostScript is a Turing-complete language. Source code is copyrightable, so this tracks