What 'free font' actually allows

Why search by situation

Most people looking for a font are not designers. They are making next week's slides, building their own mobile wedding invitation, or fixing a YouTube thumbnail. They do not know font names. What they know is the thing they are making. So what they type into a search box is not a font name but 'wedding font' or 'font for slides'.

Existing sites are strong on names and classes. You choose sans or serif or handwriting, choose a weight, search a name. What they do not tell you, among hundreds of sans faces, is which one belongs in a slide deck. This site fills that one gap. Type the job, get fonts tagged for it, and read why.

A person gave the tags. We read the distributor's description, rendered each font, and judged on four axes: weight, decoration, readability, mood. Many fonts have a one-line description, so the rendering is half the evidence. That is why a tag is a recommendation, not a verdict. Use the font elsewhere if it fits.

How to read a free font license

Four things matter in a free font license: commercial use, embedding in documents and apps, redistributing the files, and selling the font itself. 'Free' usually means only the first. The other three differ from license to license.

Every Korean font on Google Fonts is under the SIL Open Font License, OFL. OFL allows use, study, modification and redistribution, and allows embedding in documents and software. What it forbids is selling the font file on its own, and keeping the reserved name on a modified version. The text says the fonts may be bundled and sold with software. This site's cards summarise that as commercial allowed, embedding allowed, redistribution allowed, selling by itself not allowed.

Fonts issued by Korean municipalities and public bodies usually carry a KOGL mark, the Korea Open Government License. KOGL has four types. Type 1 requires only attribution. Type 2 adds no commercial use. Type 3 adds no modification. Type 4 adds both restrictions. The font page shows which type, and that is the first thing to look at.

KOGL font pages often say nothing about embedding or redistribution. When that happens this site does not write 'allowed'. It writes 'not confirmed'. Claiming a permission that is not there would land on the person who used the font. Asking the issuing body directly is the surest route.

Licenses change. Institutions revise their terms, and fonts are withdrawn. That is why every card carries the date it was checked. If that date is old, or the job is important, open the original link once more.

How this site works, exactly

This section describes what the code actually does. The font list comes from two places. One is Google Fonts' public family list, the same address the Google Fonts site reads to draw its own catalogue; we keep only families whose subsets include Korean. The other is KOGL fonts, and only those whose issuing page we actually opened on the founding date and read the license wording from. A font whose page we could not open is not in the list.

Google Fonts licenses are checked per font. The Google Fonts repository keeps, in every font's folder, a file naming the license kind and the license text itself; the collection script reads that file for each font, copies the kind, and puts the link to the text on the card. A font without that file is left out.

No font files are downloaded. The collection script reads the list, the license and the description, and not one byte of a font file. The preview on screen is the browser reading Google Fonts' CSS directly. KOGL fonts cannot be drawn because there is no file, so the card says so and links to the distributor. We do not copy preview images or descriptions from other sites.

Search works like this. If what you typed matches a situation's name or one of its synonyms, you get the fonts tagged for that situation. If not, the site tries a partial match on font names. If neither matches, the result is empty. Nothing similar is invented. Results are in data order, not popularity order, because there is no popularity data and we do not pretend there is.

Saved fonts live only in this device's browser storage. A compare-list link puts the situation, the font names and the sample text into the address parameters; nothing is stored on a server, and whoever opens the link gets the same list redrawn on their screen. The sample text is capped at 80 characters.

The server counts only how far a visit got: page opened, a search made, a click out to a distributor, a link copied, a first input. One line with the date, the language and a traffic label. What you searched for is never recorded.

Choosing

First look at how much text the job has. One line can carry a heavy, decorated face. Past three lines, an even and quiet face is what stays readable. The card's axis line, headline or long text, makes this quick.

A font with many weights can carry a whole hierarchy on its own. With nine weights you set titles bold, body regular and footnotes light, all in one family, and the document reads as one piece. A single-weight font goes on the title line and pairs with something else for the body.

Two fonts are enough for most jobs. One for titles, one for body. Past three the page gets noisy. Use at most one handwriting font in a piece.

If Latin letters are mixed in, read the card's description. Some Korean fonts carry no Latin at all. Type English in one of those and the program silently substitutes another font, and the letterforms split.

Job by job

A YouTube thumbnail has to read at the size of a palm. Heavy, angular faces win, and around ten characters is plenty. A thin handwriting face disappears on a small screen no matter how large you set it. Every font tagged for thumbnails here has a weight axis of bold or black.

Subtitles change line by line, so a face with even strokes and open counters reads best. For a bright variety-show feel a rounded sans fits; for information videos a standard sans fits. If you add an outline or shadow, thin faces get buried, so choose regular or heavier.

A wedding invitation has two different spots. The cover line suits a decorated serif or a thin brush script; the body suits a soft serif. Both are in the wedding tag, so read the axis line to tell them apart. On a mobile card keep the body at regular weight.

Slides are read from a distance. The safest set-up is a body sans at regular weight with titles in the same family's bold. Fonts tagged for slides here are mostly those with many weights. Use the presentation program's embed-fonts option only with fonts that allow embedding. OFL fonts do.

A horror game thumbnail wants a rough brush script or a scratched texture. Those faces usually come in one weight with weak Latin support, so if an English title is mixed in, set the English in another font.

Where people get stuck

If your slides open on another computer with a different font, that computer does not have it. Save with fonts embedded, or export to PDF. Embed only when the font allows embedding.

If a Google Fonts download gives you several files, that is one file per weight. Install them all, or bold will be faked by the program and the letters will smear.

If this site's license line differs from another site's, one of them is out of date or summarising differently. This site shows the check date and the original link, so the answer is to open the original and read today's wording. We do not rule on other sites.

If your situation is not here, pick the nearest example or search by font name. The situations are a fixed set gathered from what people actually type, and we did not force tags onto situations that do not exist. If you need one added, tell us through the contact address.

If a font has been withdrawn or a link is dead, the institution may have stopped distributing it. That happened after the card's check date, so this site does not know yet. Tell us and we will check and fix the list.