Every single font in a computer has a licence expect for the case when the font is freeware. This licence ensures that the font is protected by copyright law. As an example, all the standard windows fonts are on licence with Microsoft.

If someone wants to create a document to display text in a font such as “Baskerville Old Face” there has to be a copy of that font on the computer. Since everything on the internet is electronic, we needed to find a way to share our documents that use “Baskerville Old Face” without having to give everyone who reads it a copy of the font. This is why we use Embedding Fonts.

Each font is a little file on the computer. Each time we create a document with a program like Word, the program will ask you if you want to embed a copy of the font inside the document you are making. In other words, if you want to send a document that contains a lot of text in “Baskerville Old Face”, the person who will receive your document doesn’t need to have a licensed copy of the font to see the display as you intended. Computers are clever enough to substitute the closest font available. This means that if you send a document that uses Arial and the computer of the receiver doesn’t have a licensed copy of Arial, the text will show either in Helvetica or Verdana instead.