There have been a few threads mentioning this already. I could not find the one I was thinking of, which did not shed much light on it anyway, but I managed to find a Typophile article called Monotype's SkyFonts Service Enables Font Rentals but I cannot figure out if it is a news posting or a blog entry.

Not yet, but I may be trialling the service in the next couple of weeks.

I have the beta - it seems to work fine. When the time is up the text goes to Courier. :-)

The utility you install to use the fonts manages their availability.

hhp

Seems like it would be pretty easy to hack

What’s to stop you from copying the installed font to an external drive? What happens if you disconnect your machine while you are renting the font? I don’t have an account yet, but I agree with Ryan. This seems full of holes.

Seems like it would be pretty easy to hack
This seems full of holes.

I doubt that.
I am not sure for which “side” you are arguing. For 20 years font users complain that they have to pay the full font license, before getting the chance to try the font in their design apps on their machines.
Skyfonts makes a lot of sense in this regard. Try the fonts free of charge, present different options to your clients. And it's also great for something like recreating a logo with 5 letters, which you have just got as JPG image from the client. Now you just pay for 1 day to use that font and you don't have to buy the full license.
I find that much more convincing than Fontslice – especially, since Monotype has almost all the fonts the users really want to use.

So, as long as your LaTeX compilation run is under 5 minutes, all fonts are free now! :P

>Seems like it would be pretty easy to hack

They have an additional level of security...

lol, nice!

octothorpussy

Boldfinger

Dr. №