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Fonts Audit Discovery

When you bought the PCs that you use in your organization, it came pre-installed with a large collection of fonts. Many more fonts may be installed when you install other programs such as a word processor or CAD program. When these are installed, no mention is made you about what fonts are being installed and where they are being placed. Nor is any mention made in the License agreements that come with the software.

Very often, you may have installed a program for evaluation purposes and a suite of fonts gets installed with it. Later you decide it is not the program for you so you uninstall it. Unfortunately, it is all too often the case that the fonts installed with the evaluation are left in place.

Many of these fonts may be subject to copyright restrictions leaving at risk of being sued for copyright infringement - even though you have done the right thing.

As with software licenses it is extremely important that you keep on top of the copyright material you have installed on your computers. And this is where Discovery Fonts comes in.

Discovery Fonts conducts a fonts audit that very quickly gets you a picture of the 6 fonts most commonly installed on your computers, many of which may be subject to copyright restrictions.

Within a couple of minutes you can have a detailed report showing the number of those fonts installed on your computers. You also get a csv file that you can upload into a spreadsheet or database for later analysis and tracking.

Fonts Audit Discovery

Discovery Fonts was developed by Secrett Systems on behalf of PCProfile to enable you to rapidly conduct a fonts audit on the PCs in your organization.

Discovery Fonts requires no installation and is designed to conduct a fonts audit directly from a USB flash drive.

Discovery Fonts writes the fonts audit reports directly to your flash drive.

Discovery Fonts scans all of the fixed disks (hard disk drives) on your computer. As it conducts the fonts audit, it builds a directory tree showing where all the fonts are located and also fills a table showing the fonts name, type and location. Once the fonts audit is complete, you can select a font in the tree or the data table and instantly see it's properties in another table. If you selected a font from the tree, that font is also selected in the data table and vice versa.

In the table on the bottom right of the screenshot above, you can see a common result of querying the properties of a font. There is little, if anything, telling you about who owns the copyright.

The image below shows what we would expect to see, namely who created the font and who owns the copyright.

Fonts Audit Discovery - Evaluation

Click here if you would like to evaluate Discovery Fonts. With evaluation you get a flavour of the what the program can do for you. Although it will collect all the information about all the fonts on your PC, the evaluation restricts you to looking at the properties of 20 of those fonts. Additionally, it doesn't allow you to save the csv or HTML reports. You can, however, download examples of the output files created by Fonts Audit Discovery.

Click here to download an evaluation copy of Discovery Fonts.

Unzip the downloaded file to a USB flash disk, then double click the file Discovery Fonts.exe to run.

Fonts Audit Discovery - Full Version Pricing

Once you reach the 20 fonts limit, a dialog is displayed advising that you must register to continue using the program. Click the Register button to generate an email requesting pricing. Pricing is dependent upon the number of PCs in your organization.

In your email, describe your needs and send the email. PCProfile will then get back to you with pricing. Once paid, the full version will be delivered by email.

Font Audit Discovery- Frequently Asked Questions about Fonts

Why do a lot of fonts have no details that can be used to identify what they are and who they are licensed to?

You will notice that a large number of the fonts on your systems are likely to have no details displayed apart from name of font and path. This is not an issue with our software but a failure on the part of the OEM software vendor (including Microsoft) to embed the relevant details within the font program itself.

Is there some way of determining which font was installed by which software application, and when it was installed?

Unfortunately not. This is an issue that the software vendors have not and will not address for some time so we are confident that although organisations are trying to trap people for font piracy they will only be successful in a few cases and not wider like the software vendors.

Where can you find details about font licensing arrangements? Are they inside the Eula’s for software?

Very rarely does this feature listed as an item within Software Eula’s in our experience and this is based on the fat that we have examined almost 300 Eula’s for most major applications on the market and very little mention is made specifically of fonts.

Are there specific Eula’s for Fonts?

Yes, BUT very few exist in reality unless you purchase a license for Fonts only. They certainly don’t exist in conjunction with installed software.

Is there some master library that we can look up or build to match what you have with some external knowledge base?

No. The key issue here is no one will maintain that sort of knowledge base as the risks of false positives that occur when you match a file name with an external source is that you can never be certain the match is correct.  This is also true for software application matching. We have been auditing software since 1991 so have a significant amount of knowledge and experience of all the pitfalls that occur with auditing.

Thank you for considering Discovery Fonts - the tool for conducting a Fonts Audit Discovery.

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