Clarification on Including Icon Fonts in Themes

Hello friends, I was wondering if support or staff could clarify some of the details about the new rules regarding including icon fonts with themes. The only reference I can find is here: http://themeforest.net/forums/thread/using-custom-fonts-on-themeforest-items/69689?page=1#611634

The post by Jarel touches on it, but doesn’t say exactly what the reasoning is. Of course, I can understand Envato wants to protect themselves from copyright issues. I’ve seen users with fonts that clearly should not be included with a theme. But why disallow icon fonts entirely, even with proper licenses? Should that not be left up to the author to regulate, just like with copyrighted images?

Especially with 100% commercial friendly licenses available for many of these icon fonts, it seems regressive for theme development. Especially when plenty of current marketplace themes utilize copyrighted or limited-use PNG icon sets, with seemingly no repercussion.

The alternative of having a buyer install the font themselves is very unrealistic. Many theme buyers can barely install the theme itself, even with docs and an install video, let alone go out and find and install a font properly.

Anyway, a little insight here would be great!

Mike

I completely agree!

If nothing else, we should have a “Whitelist” of fonts – especially icon fonts – that are allowed.

Forcing users to install fonts on their own is going to drastically lower customer satisfaction, I’m afraid.

I’d love to get some clarification on this as well – thanks!

Chris

Hopefully this changes eventually, had to assist a few buyers with this.

+1

Just wanted to add that this new font thing has been going on for two months now and there still hasn’t been a clear announcement or guidelines for it. If something like this is going to be pushed out, it’d be nice to see it announced and clarified. I don’t see an excuse for how all of this can’t happen at once.

I’ll get something started on this right now. Being the Aussie weekend, we may have to wait till Monday or so to hear back, but I know you guys aren’t working anyway

+1

As Mike said, there are some great icon fonts out there that are completely licensed for us to use them in our themes. Some of these even have fairly big followings around them like FontAwesome for Bootstrap, for example.

And with this whole emerging retina display compatibility buzz feature on the horizon that I’m sure will sell many themes for Envato over the next year, I think it’s definitely something that needs to be defined and taken into consideration.

And as Chris said, maybe it would be a good idea for Envato to come have a list of ones we can use. Allow authors to point out new ones to Envato staff and their corresponding licenses in order for them to possibly be approved and added to this list that everyone can benefit from.

Everything Mike and everyone mentioned +1

Also, I’m not just interested in icon fonts but using @font-face fonts from google etc as I was told I can’t use those either now (well can’t include and have to inform the buyer they get the car but not the wheels – that’s the way I see it)

Thanks

Everything Mike, Jason and Jonathan said +3

+4