Hey I found a site with free fonts that are downloadable, and easy to use with a word processor or other programs. Has a lot of options to look through, so you can find a few that resonate with what you are looking for in a font. https://www.1001freefonts.com/ There are a lot of sites like this, so it is not like you have to stick with just one. But you are not limited to just the options in your cover making programs selection.
1) As with all fonts, check the license. Sometimes you'll need to pay to actually use, sometimes you cannot simply use them for commercial uses (i.e., the cover of a book that you want to sell) even though they're free to download. 2) Most of the fonts on the free sites are very limited. They're practically ONLY usable for covers or greeting cards or such. That might be OK for a lot of people here. There are very few free sites I know that have a wide selection of professional looking fonts that look nice for a wider variety of uses. One such site is https://fonts.google.com. Once more, check the license, since Google also lists commercial (expensive) fonts in there, but aside from that, the last fonts I downloaded and actually USE are from there. 3) http://www.feorag.com/freestuff/ is the site of Charlie Stross' wife where she offers a handful of fonts for download she designed. Some are celtic, some nerdy/cyberpunkish in style. I happen to like them, so I thought I plug them here.
It says free for personal or commercial use. Anyone can submit a custom made font at that site. That is why I posted shared it, because it has a wide variety, and it is meant more for Covers than for writing a whole book with (but you can if you really want too). Since it is a private site, it does cover it uses and terms, while being easier than paying for something you only might use once or twice.
This part would worry me. If somebody fails to understand copyright and submits a font that they don't truly own, and you use it for your cover, you're the one in trouble.
When I accessed the site right now (the selection of the fonts appearing varies with each reload), all the fonts on the page that came up said "Free for Personal use". Half of them had a button for "Buy Commercial License", the others a "Donate to Designer". IOW, none of them should have been used without further action for a commercial product like a book cover.
But there are others that say 'FREE' and 'PUBLIC DOMAIN.' Those are the ones you can use for free without recrimination and most of them have .TXT files in the downloads that contain license information and whatnot. If, after a reasonable amount of research, you're still unsure if you should use a font, then it's probably best you didn't, but there are definitely some 100% free fonts on there to choose from.
Yes. As I said. Check each single font. Don't simply download and use. Don't assume that there's no problem using it because the SITE allows free download. Once you have installed the fonts, you tend to forget the license. So it's best to avoid installing things you do not necessarily have the license for. (IANAL, so take this with a grain of salt: If you make a text in a graphic program, and export a final image in a format like JPG or PNG, you're probably fine. After all, you could have painted the text by hand that just happens to look like that font. Problems mostly arise if you use an editable format, embed the font within, and send this to someone else, like your printing service, or embed the font in your ebook and then sell the font with your ebook even if you're not allowed to sell the font. PDF is such a format where you can embed fonts, and it can happen without you realizing. It's very hard to protect the shapes and look of glyphs within a font. What is protected is the software that makes up the font, and allows you to type special characters, scale the size, get ligatures automatically and such.)
Don’t forget Adobe Typekit! That’s the easiest thing to use, since it’s integrated with InDesign and Illustrator (etc.). About 20–25 years ago I bought a "Bitstream special" which was all their fonts on CD. However, I’ve lost that disc.
(emphasis mine) I beg to differ. Normal tools make it impossible to embed the font without the font being marked as being embeddable. Embedding the font (when it is explicitly marked as being allowed) is not the same as selling the font, but is an explicitly allowed action.
GIMP is freeware, and has a limited font selection, but now I'm wondering if the fonts that come with it are okay to use for publishing. I also just realized it may be using fonts that were already on my computer. I never gave consideration to this, and it sounds like a lot of Google research. I guess that's another reason to consider hiring a cover designer.
Gimp does use the same fonts that the rest of your programs use. So you are kinda limited in that aspect.
Look at the font in the control panel. On Win10, I see a info box at the bottom. For Arial, which comes with Windows, it says "Font embeddability: Editable". On a Linux Libertine font, it shows "Installable". Every font will be marked internally in the file as Print/Preview, Editable, Installable, or None. When you create the PDF export, the tools should embed fonts that are used for a lot of text, pull individual characters out of fonts that are only used for a word or two, when embedding is allowed. Where embedding is not allowed, it will render the individual letters as curves at some specific setting. If you use brand-name tools, don’t worry about it — they’re all in on it and will respect the license rules. If it’s an open-source tool, check the font file yourself and make sure it isn’t flagged “No Embedding”. GIMP is a raster (bitmap) program, and you don’t have to worry about this at all. Any file you save will be pictures of rendered text, not TTF shape information. (Well, Photoshop has text layers now, so maybe GIMP does as well? But it never embeds the font at all.)
more to the point GIMP is a photo editing program and will do a lousy job of creating a cover - in Adobe terms Gimp is photoshop , Scribus is Indesign
