Font licensing - what are the rules etc?

So I'm trying to style the Battletech - A Time of War sheet to look more like the actual character record sheet included in the source book. I've found the font that is used for the character sheet, and even downloaded it for free from a website. However, looking at the properties of the font, it looks like it's published by Nebiolo, and based on some Google searching, is now owned by URW. As a result, I'm not convinced I can legally use this font, even though I found it offered for free on a website. How does this all tie back into Roll20? Considering anything used in a character sheet is used by Roll20, am I exposing them to legal trouble if I use a font in a character sheet that neither I nor they have the rights to use? Is it possible for Roll20 to purchase the rights to use a particular font? TLDR; I wanna use a specific font but I don't want anybody to be sued. How can I find out whether or not people will be sued if I use it?

Well, to save you the hassle of worrying about this for now...you can't use any external fonts in character sheets.  Even if you uploaded the font to gitHub with you character sheet, it wouldn't work...at least not the way you want. At the current time, the only fonts you can reliably use have them appear in the character sheet the way you expect are: Patrick Hand Contrail One Shadows Into Light Candal TaimatMedium tiamat Helvetica Neue Pictos There are also a couple of dice fonts if you want to know what they are (or they can be found in the CSS Wizardry wiki entry).

Using the @font-face in the CSS file won't let me use an external font? I've seen a number of other CSS sheets using @font-face to load an externally-hosted font, and assumed that that was a legitimate way of using external fonts.

You can use it, but it won't render unless the user manually allows it... What I mean is, Chrome and Firefox will throw up an "Unsafe" message in the URL bar and the fonts won't reload unless the user specifically allows the browser to load unsafe scripts (or something like that). So, you can do it, but most people (in my experience) won't notice it and/or won't load it. So, it turned out to be more effort than it was worth.&nbsp; There is a suggestion in the Suggestions forum for Roll20 to allow Google Fonts, it's currently queued, but no release date yet. Once that happens, then fonts may be a more viable option. You may want to see if you can find a google font that close to the one you want to use, but unless the font's license allows you to use it in this manner, I think you'll be out of luck (and even then, I think you'd be out of luck if it's not in the channel implemented...not speaking nor speculating on what Roll20 can/will do with this request...merely stating if it were me). I won't speak for Roll20, but if it were me, I wouldn't license the font for an unofficially supported sheet, because it could open a slippery slope of every other sheet author wanting Roll20 to purchase fonts for other unofficially supported sheets, etc. All that being said...you may be better off sending a message to <a href="mailto:team@roll20.net" rel="nofollow">team@roll20.net</a> with this request. I'll think you'll get a more timely and official answer from the roll team that way.

Yeah I discovered the unsafe issue and the queued request to add support for Google fonts. I added my own vote to it. :P Hopefully they add it soon. I'd like to use the proper font, but maybe I'll have to settle for something similar on Google. I do find it odd that any requests to external resources from within a CSS file are proxied through the Roll20 image server, or whatever is going on there. You'd think they could easily make that request a secure request as well... oh well.

I'll give that a try, then, although I'm not super hopeful I'll get a positive response. :P I'll plan on using a Google font, then, so make your developers hurry up and get that working! :P