Unfortunately, the license permits the use of the font only for "non-commercial" purposes, which means that it cannot be included in Free Software distributions.
Non-commercial licenses are IMO seriously wrongheaded. It's hardly a unique problem here. See also Creative Commons which spent something like a decade trying to define what the term meant and then ended up pretty much punting when it came time for 4.0.
Even leaving aside philosophical free software issues, the practicalities are considerable. A term (as in this license) such as "not aimed at direct or indirect financial gain" could be read as ruling out pretty much any non-trivial public use given how many things are indirectly monetized in various ways today.
The main practicality is how many of the commercial users are just going to ignore the niceties of the license and use it regardless.
Getting people to understand that "No Copyright Intended" [0] doesn't absolve them of copyright infringement is tough enough. You'll never get some nontrivial number of people to understand that free download doesn't mean free for every potential conceivable purpose ever in perpetuity.
"Just" that. But the reality is that if I'm looking for a commercially licensed photograph, font, or whatever, there are already plenty of sites that I can go to and pay for. And, if I'm looking for something free in a situation that clearly doesn't fall under non-commercial (e.g. marketing materials), I'm just going to skip over anything with a "non-commercial" only license and pick something else.
'Just' - but many need to do that through a legal department, so that requirement would be a dead stop unless there was an extreme advantage gained vs alternatives.
> While typing, you will notice that it is a much more sophisticated handwritten font than others. Spaces between words will not be perfectly identical, and the same two words when typed next to each will not look the same either, thus giving an impression that the text is actually written by hand.
How is this accomplished? I assume there's a ligature for spaces depending on the preceding character - but how does one randomise the ligatures between pairs of characters?
However they do it, it repeats deterministically. Every third character in a repeated string is the same. If you paste "EEE| |EoEoEoEo| |EoiEoiEoi|" into the box and note the changes to the 'E' you should observe the way the E is dependent on the previous characters, but only for a certain distance. I assume this is a ligature-like feature but I don't know enough about fonts to say any more.
I was trying the Turkish characters and it surprised me by having İ. Very interestingly, it didn't have ı. Does anyone know an alphabet which has İ but not ı?
I don't think any languages make use of İ but not ı; perhaps when you press the İ key on your keyboard the actual character sequence that gets entered is the decomposition "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I (U+0049) COMBINING DOT ABOVE (U+0307)"? OpenType has tags that allow you to describe where arbitrary combining diacritics go relative to a glyph, so maybe the font knows how to assemble those two code points into an İ, even though the font designer didn't explicitly design for Turkish. Just speculating here.
The demonstration text on the web site omits Q, but it exists in the actual font file. Maybe there's no Q in Lithuanian?
Too bad about the license, or I'd use it for lots of things. Though I think Millennials who weren't taught cursive writing may have trouble with capital i and both z's.
I was immediately disappointed by not being able to write my name (with ú and Á).
It can work for Lithuanian, German, English, but not other languages that use different diacritics, as it doesn't have any others (accute, grave, circumflex, tilde, etc).
It would be interesting to automate the creation of fonts from historical documents by training CNNs to extract suitable sample letters and transform them.
That wouldn't be a replacement for serious projects like this, where an actual typographer was paid to work for 160 hours. But it could be fun to try lots of documents and see how the fonts they yield vary.