Package & Deployment Wizard confusion

[tedsmith]

I am confused with how to make an installation install in a new folder other than one in the Program files and how to include a font and jpg graphics in the installation package so the user doesn't have to separately install them.

For example how do you change the installation script to get a font to install - or is something else needed?

 

[dilettante]

Some fonts may be public domain. Others you might license, but only per-user or per-computer.

Some licensed fonts may only require a developer license and allow free redistribution as a licensee. Others may require a license per installation.

So "redistributable" might mean completely free, or free after you pay for a developer/redistributor license, or require a paid license for each machine or user you redistribute it to.

A non-redistributable font would be something that you can never legally redistribute. These are usually part of some software suite or font pack licensed to one machine or user. I.e. the vendor can distribute them to customers, but you cannot redistribute them to your customers.

 

[strongm]

>impossible to automatically install as strongm suggests?

Just to clarify, I suggested no such thing, although looking back at my post I see that it could be read that way. I was talking about the legal position concerning redistribution of fonts, not any technical limitation.

 

[dilettante]

I can see where some of the confusion might come from. Certain system component files are considered "not redistributable" by Microsoft for technical rather than legal reasons. Usually this is because they are shipped as part of the OS, may contain OS-dependent code or rely on other components in a suite, and are meant to be updated via Windows Update or Service Packs or installed as a suite and not as individual files.

Fonts would typically not fall into such a category even though some need to be distributed as a font set. Typical reasons for this might be that "italic" for example might be implemented as an additional set of glyphs rather than produced from the base ("normal") font file algorithmically.

 

[AndyGroom]

Yes, quite right, there are no technical reasons why you can't install a font as part of your installation script; no installer is clever enough to decide whether you have copyright permission to install a font or not.

It also raises an interesting point - if you install a demo version of Office (which includes Arial Narrow) and then uninstall it, does it remove the fonts? I'm not sure that it does since it can't know for sure that you didn't already have Arial Narrow installed as part of another valid application installation. It's a bit like installing a VB6 application on a clean machine and then uninstalling it only to find that all the VB6 runtime files are left behind in case they're "used by other applications".

- Andy
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