Font inventory

[scott_thornhill]

Are there built in capabilities to inventory for commercial Fonts?  I have a need to inventory and setup license metrics for commercial fonts that are deployed desktop, web, and print imbeded.

[mfranz]

Hi,

My customers, managing their commercial fonts, made sure to create installer packages so that inventory would pick them up on the machines they're deployed to. With these evidences you can then link to manually created applications. These apps can then be used in licenses as you like, user or device type.

I found this to be a simple but effective solution.

Best regards,

Markward

Edit: I would go with a package per font family.

[scott_thornhill]

Thank you for the response.

This is a good process.

It is not a inventory solution.  It is a packaging solution.

Fonts are one of the original copy righted items.  They are software now.   They can automatically be installed just by opening a document.  I am needing an inventory solution to identify fonts and the software vendor that owns them. 

[mfranz]

Hi,

If everyone can install them by opening a document, you might just have a problem on a whole other level.

Here are some ideas regarding inventory:

1. FNMS Agent file inventory might sound like an approach, but I believe the inventoried file types cannot be customized.
2. Some scripting might help, either locally or remotely, using PowerShell (if Windows machines). Of course, other languages will work as well. Here is something to build upon: https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/archive/blogs/mediaandmicrocode/microcode-powershell-scripting-tricks-get-font Having looked at the results, you'll likely have to go for the actual file for some more details.
   From there it's basically the question how to inject the data into FNMS. I see two ways:
   1. Find a way to make the information part of the inventory file, and leverage the existing data flow and processing.
   2. Make it your own data structure and find a new way collecting it (maybe involving 3rd party tools) and importing it into FNMS (perhaps via Business Import).

Best regards,

Markward

[flexeranoob]

i would be interested to see if there are any solutions to this..

[ChrisG]

I don't know of any solutions to handle font inventory gathering and licensing beyond what has already been discussed in this thread. However the following Idea related to has now been logged, so you may want to consider voting for it: FNMS-I-118: Detection of usage of commercial fonts.

[mfranz]

Hi,

If you can, make a push for a smart deployment solution. If there are installer packages used to deploy the fonts, you should have an easy time using standard inventory strategies.

Best regards,

Markward

[flexeranoob]

But the question is, does ARL recognize the commercial fonts?

Also, I am looking for a larger solution, which Flexnet cannot solve, but I  would like to seek an opinion anyway.  Is there a tool available, that could scan target websites and let me know the fonts used, that would be nice.  If it can classify them into free/commercial as well, that would be great