[HN Gopher] Font Smuggler - Copy hidden brand fonts into Google ...
___________________________________________________________________
Font Smuggler - Copy hidden brand fonts into Google Docs
Author : lanewinfield
Score : 152 points
Date : 2026-03-13 16:35 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (brianmoore.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (brianmoore.com)
| dijit wrote:
| Whoa. How does this work?
|
| One of the major issues we had at my previous company weaning
| people off of powerpoint (to google docs) was brand fonts. Ours,
| of course.
|
| A lot of what is considered brand identity in presentations comes
| from fonts, which makes Google Docs Slides a non-starter for many
| unfortunately.
|
| (we ended up making them in powerpoint and using the Google Docs
| compatibility mode with pptx).
| rafram wrote:
| > Google Workspace lets brands who pay enough embed custom
| corporate fonts into their docs and slides. Normally, these are
| locked to just those brands shelling out for custom typefaces,
| but there's one loophole: the ol' copy/paste.
| mhitza wrote:
| From the small info icon that opens up a section.
| > Google Workspace lets brands who pay enough embed custom
| corporate fonts into their docs and slides. Normally, these are
| locked to just those brands shelling out for custom typefaces,
| but there's one loophole: the ol' copy/paste. Below are a
| selection of brand fonts with which you can do exactly that.
| Enjoy.
| dijit wrote:
| Oh thanks! I looked but I missed that.
|
| So, I need to be super rich? Thats sad.
| vrganj wrote:
| Why did we go from owning the software we run and being
| able to just modify things as we see fit to "You have to
| give Google a lot of money so you can have your own font in
| your own presentation"?
|
| Where did things go this wrong?
| Someone wrote:
| If you want to drink your own wine in a restaurant, you
| have to pay for that, too.
|
| This isn't much different; there still are plenty of non-
| Google options for creating presentations to choose from
| that do allow using your own font.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If SaaS is a restaurant, what's software I purchase? A
| personal robot chef with an infinite ingredient supply,
| no charge for using my own wine?
|
| I think that supports the "Where did things go this
| wrong?" sentiment.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The analogies with physical businesses never make sense.
| Running an application on your own computer is nothing
| like eating at a restaurant. Just because the software is
| obtained from a server somewhere doesn't mean it's like
| going to a physical place to eat. Browsing to
| www.company.com is not akin to walking into a company's
| physical store. You're not "there." There is no "there."
| Andrex wrote:
| I'm going to go the unpopular route and ask, how mission-
| critical are _fonts,_ really? Protected fonts such as
| these _can 't_ be mission-critical, legally, right?
|
| Never felt myself lacking for fonts in Docs, myself.
| Quite the opposite, Google Fonts has way more than I'd
| ever have preinstalled and is now my primary avenue for
| typeface discovery.
| vrganj wrote:
| Depends on what you do.
|
| Are you building a slide deck on your systems
| architecture? Probably doesn't matter.
|
| Are you building a marketing deck on your new corporate
| identity? Probably matters a lot.
|
| Either way, the tool I'm using shouldn't be the one
| deciding what matters and what doesn't. Just let me use
| my font as I please!
| brk wrote:
| It doesn't matter on the corporate identity either.
| selectodude wrote:
| It may not matter to you, but in this circumstance, your
| opinion doesn't matter.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| It only matters to the designers. The users don't care
| which sans-serif font the designers picked, they all look
| the same.
| circuit10 wrote:
| It's subtle, but attention to detail all around will add
| up to something that looks polished. I appreciate that as
| a user, at least
| vrganj wrote:
| The designers are generally the ones doing and watching
| presentations on design. They are also the users of the
| office suite in this case.
| rafram wrote:
| Fine, I'll take the bait. If this is true, then why isn't
| everything in the world Arial/Helvetica?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Because people are stupid enough to worry about many
| things which don't matter. This includes, but is not
| limited to, font choices.
| 9864247888754 wrote:
| That's the most retarded take I've seen in a while.
| ozaark wrote:
| You'd be hesitant to trust a brand if it can't keep
| consistent styling. Branding helps users identify a brand
| and believe it or not the aesthetics of a brand make a
| great deal of impact on consumers.
|
| As others have said, your point comes across as "let's
| remove design who cares" because design and human
| computer interaction roles stopped where your
| understanding ends. Everything looks the same to you
| after all (it doesn't, you just haven't noticed it
| affecting your decision making).
| Andrex wrote:
| I could see some kafkaesque organization writing-up or
| firing someone for using the wrong font on a PowerPoint
| presentation.
|
| Such companies should be mocked and shamed, not held up
| as examples to follow.
| wongarsu wrote:
| You can still pay Microsoft money to get a desktop copy
| of Powerpoint, which will use your system fonts. Using
| google docs is entirely self-inflicted
|
| Granted, you now need to pay Microsoft a monthly fee for
| Powerpoint instead of a one-time-fee. But that is in
| large part because too many people preferred Google Docs,
| so Microsoft tried to become more like them
| gschizas wrote:
| You can still pay Microsoft a one-time-fee instead of a
| yearly one. You can even go to a physical store and get a
| physical box with Office (granted, it doesn't contain
| anything inside it anymore )
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| When we stopped paying for things. Seriously. If you pay
| for software, you can modify it. If you pay Google,
| they'll modify it for you.
|
| Yes, the EULA may prohibit modifications of local
| installations, but you're not physically restricted from
| doing so - only contractually.
| crazygringo wrote:
| No, you need to be at least a medium-sized corporation
| basically.
|
| Then because your contract with Google is large enough to
| matter, they'll add your custom corporate branded fonts to
| your font dropdowns.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Basically the level where you've progressed from user to
| customer.
| Mattwmaster58 wrote:
| copy/paste doesn't tell you much - here's the text/html content
| they put on your clipboard if you're curious. Apparently GDocs
| supports this out of the box, just hides it from the selection
| box. Which makes sense given that it doesn't support any font.
|
| <html> <body> <!--StartFragment--><meta charset='utf-8'><meta
| charset="utf-8"><b style="font-weight:normal;" id="docs-
| internal-guid-8b11d82e-1a25-4b6a-be64-ebdd55b2a698"><p
| dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.2;margin-top:0pt;margin-
| bottom:0pt;"><span style="font-size:22pt;font-family:'Facebook
| Sans',sans-serif;color:#000000;background-
| color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-
| variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-
| align:baseline;white-space:pre;white-space:pre-wrap;">I just
| stole Facebook Sans</span></p></b><br class="Apple-interchange-
| newline"><!--EndFragment--> </body> </html>
| love2read wrote:
| I really like the style of copying the "google tool" style that
| this website and jmail use. It makes the project feel different
| compared to all the ai-generated app these days.
| novov wrote:
| Is there any difference between Source Serif and Source Sans as
| listed here and the publicly available versions, given they are
| open source typefaces?
| ngrilly wrote:
| Would be really good if Google Docs could support custom brand
| fonts by letting their customers upload them in the admin
| console.
| varun_ch wrote:
| I knew about this for Google's own fonts but had no idea they
| offered the option to use custom fonts. Is there any easy place
| to find a list of them? I wonder if the custom fonts are just
| hardcoded/pushed to their CDN alongside all the other ones.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Surprised that such font access isn't gated by IP address ---
| usually font licenses are quite restrictive and have such
| requirements for usage.
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| The licenses (from major foundries/vendors) are indeed usually
| quite restrictive; however, the hard part has always been
| enforcing them. It's not surprising to me that Google hasn't
| built any guardrails around this.
|
| After all, gating by IP address? What happens if someone from
| the marketing team logs on from an airport? All of the slides
| revert to Arial?
| WillAdams wrote:
| The access would presumably need to be done through a VPN to
| have the fonts.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Ehh.. a lot of these docs go out to customers and end
| users. Playboy for instance sends out tons of their updates
| and plans to clients with their own custom fonts in it.
| WillAdams wrote:
| That's what PDFs are for --- the font files can be
| embedded in a fashion which precludes downloading/usage.
|
| Various print shops have systems in place for
| previewing/approving print jobs as well.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| This is an architectural problem. These companies share their
| documents with externals, and the documents must behave
| normally to these externals. So it doesn't just have to look as
| intended, the external person also needs to be able to edit the
| documents with the CI fonts available.
|
| One could imagine that access to the fonts could be restricted
| to the logged-in user, but that would mean that public
| documents that can be accessed without a login wouldn't have
| the specific fonts.
| F7F7F7 wrote:
| Google would sooner turn off the feature than build some
| convoluted solution to protect a custom brand font. It's a
| problem that's not worth solving.
|
| I can just as easily download them from any of the brand's
| official websites. The vast majority are being utilized via
| font-face and are rendering inside of heading and body text.
|
| Convenient WOFF format, all weights, and available in 2 clicks
| in Dev Tools. And if Dev Tools is too difficult there are
| dozens of free extensions that will do it for you.
|
| I'd argue that what little Google provides now is more secure
| than the official websites' usage.
| ILoveHorses wrote:
| Any idea how did the creator manage to get access to the fonts in
| the first place? Won't you need a Google Docs document which uses
| the given font and then copy it from there and put it up on the
| website? Or is there some way the creator could have put these
| fonts on his website from publicly available information?
| yorwba wrote:
| It's just setting the font-family in the style attribute of a
| <span>. (As you can see by inspecting the text/html content of
| your clipboard, e.g. with `xclip -selection clipboard -o -t
| text/html`)
| bogdan wrote:
| Have a look at the raw clipboard data with something like
| https://evercoder.github.io/clipboard-inspector/ and you'll see
| how it's all set up. A bunch of markup that can be obtained
| from any google doc with the font name updated.
| lanewinfield wrote:
| hi, creator of the site here.
|
| A LONG time ago, I was shared on a document with a brand font
| and was surprised to see it was a custom one. With a bit of
| testing, I realized I could pull it into a new document and
| that new document would then become "infested" with that font
| and allow me to use it anywhere else within.
|
| I recently realized there must be even more fonts that exist
| that I don't know of, so (transparently, with the help of
| Claude,) I ran through a list of potential clients (some listed
| on Google Workspace's site, some I just assumed) and tested
| across many. This is the list I came back with.
| jmathai wrote:
| Received DMCA takedown notices for a paid font I used for my
| wife's interior design website that she liked but we didn't pay
| for because...I'm lazy.
|
| I was surprised to receive the DMCA (it is hosted on GitHub
| Pages). I ignored the emails because...I'm lazy.
|
| They (GitHub) eventually took down the repository (and site). So
| I swapped to another font and I don't think my wife noticed.
|
| I think all of this was still easier than probably paying for the
| font!
|
| Lesson of the story? Don't underestimate the impact of laziness
| on your potential customers.
| detritus wrote:
| Out of interest, did you rename the font prior to use? I'm
| curious how they found it.
|
| You can also just stick them in a font-editor and re-export "as
| your own font" with some minor tweaks. Not that you should, of
| course.
| iamcalledrob wrote:
| You really should pay, especially for work by small
| foundries.
|
| Making a typeface takes a tremendous amount of work. The
| financial upside is extremely hard to justify.
|
| I think non-designers underestimate the amount of effort
| required by an order of magnitude. I put it in the territory
| of building indie games. Potentially years of your life go
| into it, and it's a huge problem if everyone pirates your
| work.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >You really should pay, especially for work by small
| foundries.
|
| You can't copyright the alphabet.
|
| >and it's a huge problem if everyone pirates your work.
|
| I've never pirated a font. Not once have I boarded a ship
| in the middle of the ocean, gun in hand, taking the crew
| and cargo of typography hostage.
|
| But more seriously, I acknowledge that it's a problem. It's
| just not my problem.
| dhosek wrote:
| Legally, typeface _designs_ do not receive protection
| (which is based on idiotic declarations like "you can't
| copyright the alphabet") but digital font files are
| considered programs and thus are able to be protected as
| IP.1 You can try to justify the theft to yourself but
| somewhere there's an individual (or on some occasions
| many individuals) who spent a long time making decisions
| about how that typeface should look and choosing the best
| points to turn it into splines to describe the shape and
| you decided that your laziness trumps their work.
|
| [?]
|
| 1. I would note that _bitmap_ fonts do not receive the
| same protection as Type 1 or OTF fonts.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >there are plenty of perfectly legible typefaces that are
| completely free for you to use.
|
| Legally based off the carefully considered positions of
| philosophers of law like Thomas Jefferson, and others
| just as renowned, who actually created modern copyright
| law in the United States, because they weren't trying to
| set you up to be rent-seeking degenerate scribblers for
| the next umpteen millennia.
|
| >but digital font files are considered programs
|
| As precedented in case law by degenerate judges who
| should be brought up on treason charges. They aren't
| programs in any meaningful sense, culinary recipes are
| likely closer to programs (they, arguably, run on a
| Turing-complete machine, the human brain, and have
| something akin to branching going on once in awhile).
|
| >You can try to justify the theft
|
| What theft? No theft occurred, because I denied no one
| the possession of their own property. Even the judges and
| lawyers have to admit that this is at most _infringement_
| , so please use that word or just confess here and now
| that you'rea manipulative liar.
|
| >I would note that bitmap fonts do not receive the same
| protection as Type 1 or OTF fonts.
|
| What!?!?! Those aren't _programs_ too? Please, consult
| the computer scientists, they must be informed! Are they
| also not stored as ones and zeroes?
| anonymous_user9 wrote:
| Type 1 fonts are PostScript programs, while OTF and TTF
| fonts use a turing-complete virtual machine to control
| hinting, ligatures, etc.
| an-honest-moose wrote:
| >You can't copyright the alphabet.
|
| You're not paying to use the alphabet, there are plenty
| of perfectly legible typefaces that are completely free
| for you to use.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| You can't copyright basic geometric shapes either.
|
| >there are plenty of perfectly legible typefaces that are
| completely free for you to use.
|
| You mean there are plenty of bezier curved shapes which
| are within the public domain and no one can stop me. I'm
| not obligated to surrender my rights so you can turn
| typography into a business model. If you piss me off, I
| might just release tools that even stooges can use that
| copy the shapes out of the otf file, rearrange those
| completely so that no file fingerprinting will match, and
| has the user rename the files. I will go to war.
| detritus wrote:
| I'm actually a designer, have paid for many fonts -
| including licenses for websites - have made a couple myself
| and have a good idea how hard they are to make.
|
| That said, a certain corporation's bought up a load of
| fonts made over the past x decades and is making a tidy sum
| selling old rope again and again without adding anything of
| value, or funding the original designers/converters, so I'm
| quite happy to illuminate how an individual can get around
| such things for use on their personal blog with an audience
| of ten, should they so wish.
|
| .
|
| ed - you're also not as likely to be able to get a whole
| usable font from a small foundry in the first place,
| without buying it.
| jmathai wrote:
| I did not - I wasn't trying to evade - I was just being lazy.
|
| I do believe whoever the font owners are paying just scrape
| the HTML and CSS looking for patterns matching their font.
| virtualritz wrote:
| I love how all these 'brand' fonts look indistinguishable to an
| untrained eye and still brain-frying-bordedom-inducingly close to
| each other to someone like me who actually studied & worked in
| typography.
|
| Related: https://eidosdesign.substack.com/p/why-every-brand-
| looks-the...
| bensyverson wrote:
| It's just the design team running in place. And at a certain
| scale, it's cheaper to pay a type foundry $100k once, rather
| than paying Monotype continuous fees for a legacy family.
|
| But as someone who has made multiple neutral sans families, I
| agree. The launch rhetoric about creating a differentiated
| visual identity is comical when you look at all the
| interchangeable corporate sans together.
| dkuntz2 wrote:
| that's because a ton of them are just off the shelf fonts they
| had someone make minor changes to
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Pretty sure it's just the pendulum swinging. Today its all
| about serious and clean and minimal. Then it will be whimsical
| and maximalist again. Skinny jeans, baggy jeans. Skeumorphic,
| flat.
| gguncth wrote:
| The purpose of the brand font is to avoid paying licensing
| fees. Because the typefaces aren't protected by copyright it's
| usually enough to just have someone go and essentially clone an
| existing font. The whole thing is an artifact of peculiarities
| of IP law
| breakingcups wrote:
| Is that true, though? Wouldn't it be possible to just copy a
| font wholesale, since they are uncopyrightable? How would
| licensing fees be enforced?
| hedora wrote:
| I think modern fonts include hinting software and stuff
| like that.
|
| If you produced a bunch of screenshots of the output at
| various sizes, and then asked an LLM to convert to ttf or
| whatever, I'm guessing that'd be OK. I'm not an expert in
| this stuff though.
| elcapitan wrote:
| Brand fonts are typically a specific license by the
| original creator of the font, often together with some
| adjustments (e.g. big companies often need additions for
| global markets that were not in the smaller original font)
| virtualritz wrote:
| My comment was not on why but what.
|
| A brand is still free to commission a copy/clone of an
| 'interesting' font that has character (or, beware even
| serifs) ...
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > The purpose of the brand font is to avoid paying licensing
| fees.
|
| There are more than enough good fonts under OFL that it
| surprises me people want to commission a custom font
| _primarily_ for licensing reasons rather than using a
| standard one.
| layer8 wrote:
| I think they just misspelled "Bland fonts".
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Corporate branding is nothing but an exercise in playing
| psychological tricks on people. None of it is _actually_
| distinct or important. But the silver tongued guys say it is,
| so people believe it even though it isn 't true.
| tavavex wrote:
| I didn't know that many brands had their own bespoke fonts.
| Especially the less prominent players like Colgate or Korean Air.
| Was this caused by normal font licensing being so restrictive or
| expensive that they just decided to hire someone to make a font
| just for them, or design teams insisting that this sans serif
| that looks almost like all the others (but not quite) is
| essential to their design?
| russdill wrote:
| For most of these fonts, I feel fairly certain if someone gave
| me a sample I could identify the brand.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Remove the name from the font and I'm fairly certain that I'd
| get none of them, well maybe HP.
|
| E.g. the Klarna Headline is pretty distinct, but I've never
| seen it before. The four other Klarna fonts are super
| generic. Also why do they need five different fonts?
|
| Mostly I think these custom fonts are a waste of money. If
| you ship software that needs to include fonts, and you don't
| want to pay a license, it makes sense. If you do it because
| of "corporate identity" it seems pointless.
| russdill wrote:
| Different people work differently I suppose. It's true that
| some of the fonts seem designed to be forgettable, such as
| Source, Product, Optimistic. But others are, like Netflix,
| Verizon, Korean Air, HP, and Colgate look heavily branded
| to me.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >like Colgate
|
| It's still an 80 billion dollar company in market cap, so there
| is that.
|
| Also I'm guessing it's so they have another means of attack on
| knock off products that directly copy them.
| wpm wrote:
| I have respect for the design teams that at least just drop the
| bullshit and say "Yeah Inter is our font, whatever, who cares"
| numbers wrote:
| because they're brand fonts, none of them feel great to write
| more than a headline with
| youniverse wrote:
| I was just looking into the custom anthropic sans and serif fonts
| used for the claude app, I really like those!
| Dwedit wrote:
| The word YouTube really depends a lot on good kerning. The
| "YouTube Display" font has much better kerning around the
| uppercase T than the other three fonts that mention YouTube.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-17 23:01 UTC)