[detritus]

I'm actually a designer, have paid for many fonts - including licenses for websites - have made a couple myself and have a good idea how hard they are to make.

That said, a certain corporation's bought up a load of fonts made over the past x decades and is making a tidy sum selling old rope again and again without adding anything of value, or funding the original designers/converters, so I'm quite happy to illuminate how an individual can get around such things for use on their personal blog with an audience of ten, should they so wish.

.

ed - you're also not as likely to be able to get a whole usable font from a small foundry in the first place, without buying it.

[ryandrake]

Fonts are (simplifying greatly) just code, right? I wonder when AI models will be able to cleanroom-clone the general look of a font without violating the copyright on the official version's underlying code.

[xigoi]

An important part of a font is kerning. I’m guessing that LLMs would be really bad at kerning because they don’t have visual intuition.