License chaos with official resellers ("Adobe Originals")

Report · Aug 23, 2025

Hi there,

Back then:
In 2021, we invested a significant amount of money to purchase licenses for "Myriad" and "Minion" fonts from "Adobe Originals" collection for in-house use in "Microsoft Word". We bought the licenses through fonts.com, which no longer exists in its original form. The old license terms stated that we were only allowed to embed the fonts in PDFs if those PDFs were used internally or sent to a professional print service.

Now:

However, since we now want to use these fonts for client projects, I wanted to check how expensive an additional license for this purpose would be. All but one official distributor of "Adobe Originals" explicitly allows subsetting the font into non-editable PDFs for commercial purposes, as long as a desktop license has been purchased.

Only myfonts.com (apparently the successor of fonts.com) has a very complicated and cumbersome special license for embedding. They want to know how many copies are distributed in what duration of time. And the licence is valid for one year only. That feels very toxic for an enterprise environment, which is not into ebook selling, but writing scientific reports.

Our specific use case:
When a customer buys a scientific report from us, we deliver it as a PDF file with the font embedded (subsetting, the usual way). We get paid for writing the report, not for selling the PDF separately. At that point, we have absolutely no control over whether or how often the customer shares the document or where it might be distributed. Other distributors explicitly permit this usage for the fonts in question, since it's muxed into a PDF.

The big question:

Does this mean the licenses we purchased in 2021 are basically worthless now, and we have to completely re-license both fonts from scratch?

Best regards,

Tobias

Report · Aug 29, 2025

Regarding the fonts.com website, as well fontshop.com and I think a couple of others, Monotype acquired all of those sites and folded them under the myfonts.com banner. Monotype seems very intent on promoting its own fonts subscription service, which might explain why sell-thru pricing deals for fonts are nothing near as good as they were several years ago. I miss the days when a new type family would be released with as much as 90% off pricing. I don't see deals like that at the myfonts.com web site anymore. Further, a number of type designers/developers have withdrawn their type libraries from the MyFonts site and now only sell their fonts direct thru their own sites. The Adobe Fonts service has a few type families that cannot be bought at the MyFonts site.

Aside from that, the Myriad and Minion families have been bundled with certain Adobe applications going back for many years. The type families are included with the Adobe Fonts service. There are multiple categories for both (Minion, Minion 3, Minion 3 Display, Minion 3 Subhead, Myriad, Myriad Variable, Myriad Wild and several international language versions).
https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/myriad

https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/minion

According to the use listings at the bottom of the typeface pages font data from the Myriad and Minion families can be embedded in PDF files for viewing and printing.

Report · Aug 30, 2025

I also find it pretty extreme that Adobe fonts like Myriad Pro and Minion Pro have essentially been “paid for” hundreds of thousands of times over the years and yet haven’t received any real updates in ages. Both are missing important, common glyphs and features you’d expect by now. Instead of proper upgrades, Adobe releases new iterations under slightly different names (like Minion 3 or Myriad Variable). The issue is that Myriad Pro and Minion Pro are still deeply embedded in many corporate identities, so switching to the newer variants isn’t easy.

What really bothers me is that MyFonts (Monotype) now enforces super-strict licensing for commercial publishing. If you use these fonts in a commercial publication, they want exact yearly sales numbers and calculate the fee based on that. Other official Adobe resellers don’t impose that limitation; they usually include publishing/EPUB rights as part of the deal. So it feels like MyFonts is just charging “on top” – probably legally, since it goes beyond the Adobe/Monotype agreement – but still, it’s a very customer-unfriendly move.

As for the second point: I specifically mentioned that we’re using Microsoft Word. That makes the Adobe subscription completely useless for us because Adobe explicitly prohibits using their fonts in non-Adobe software. Microsoft, on the other hand, is much more flexible – their fonts can be used in Adobe apps without restrictions.

Well… tough luck. Guess we’ll just have to throw some money into the monster’s mouth.

Report · Aug 30, 2025

Adobe does not restrict anyone from using fonts synced via the Adobe Fonts service in other non-Adobe applications, such as Microsoft Word. Once the fonts are added they have to be installed using the Creative Cloud Desktop App in order for other non-Adobe apps to see them. The only limitation is anyone wanting to open and edit an MS Word file containing text styled using Adobe Fonts needs a Creative Cloud subscription. It's still possible to export a PDF file within MS Word with font data embedded.

As for Monotype's super strict licensing, this is what happens when a company tries to become a monopoly. They eliminate competition and make terms much worse for consumers. I am not fond of private equity companies, and Monotype is owned by a PE company (HGGC). Private equity firms tend to have a habit of hollowing out other companies they buy. Sears used to be a titan of retail stores; it was still a good retail chain going into the 1990's. Then the chain got ruined by private equity guys. In Monotype's case they've been on a buying binge, gobbling up a startling number of other type foundries, online type stores and even type-related software firms like Extensis. Supposedly HGGC has considered selling Monotype; if they did so they would probably unload it to yet other private equity firm.

Regarding features in the Myriad and Minion type families, that usually comes down to the choices of the individual type designers and what they want to put into a specific typeface. Some typefaces have an exhaustive character set while others are pretty minimal. Minion 3 has a pretty big character set; I can't complain about it much. I wish Myriad had a larger character set and included things like native small capitals. I'm guessing not much has been done with Myriad (other than creating a variable version) since it's seen as a kind of default font, like Arial. I'd like to see the ITC Serif family updated to include all the alternate characters it had in the days before digital type. But now that Monotype owns ITC we probably won't see an update to that old typeface unless Monotype sees a big profit angle with it.

Report · Aug 31, 2025

Oh, we were actually pretty sure that usage was excluded. However, I believe it also wasn't technically possible because Adobe Fonts only provided the "variable" fonts, which Microsoft Word 365 cannot handle correctly. I will look into both again.

Hehe, the history of Monotype is a bit reminiscent of Adobe and Microsoft, who also bought up the market for their major suites 🙂 Nevertheless, I still find the annoyance that MyFonts demands a surcharge for EPUB licenses compared to other suppliers incomprehensible.

For me, it's about something really crazy: I'm missing the glyph U+200B "zero width space". In Word, you can use it to insert "desired break points" where, for example, URLs can be wrapped, but the hyperlink remains intact. This saves annoying corrections when creating accessible PDFs.

Since the copyright protection of typefaces is controversial in some countries, the publisher claims that the font is software and prohibits the modification of this software; reverse engineering is allowed to make one's own software compatible with the font... This is recognized by most countries. So, I cannot add the missing glyph and have to work with other fonts that I remove afterwards. But that's off-topic here.