I have been a user of DaFont for as long as I can remember. I have seldom had a problem with any of the typefaces I have downloaded. I have donated to authors, supported Kickstarter campaigns, licensed commercial versions, etc. All from fonts that I downloaded here.

But what I have noticed lately is that some authors are perverting this site by providing half of a typeface. Key letters are being left out on person to get folks to license the "professional" version. This is, in short, fraud when there is no disclosure. Downloading half a font is not an option on this site, so what is the official policy.

If it were up to me, I would require a minimum of 36 contiguous characters (a-z0-9) either caps or lowercase (but not mixed) (dings excluded) to qualify for a "font download". If the author doesn't provide valid characters to meet this small subset, it should not be considered part of the normal daFont collection. Perhaps they could start a new download type: Half-Fonts, or Bait-and-Switch Fonts, or better yet, they could just get real and have a "SPAM" download or "SAMPLE" download category.

If the font used to render a preview image contains all of the characters that I type in and I download the font, I'm expecting to be able to reproduce what I saw. Anything else is fraudulent and should not be included in DaFont's catalog without warning or something. It tarnishes DaFont as much as it exposes the greed and deception of the font's authors.

Rest assured that I will never license a font whose author employs this kind of deception. They are shooting themselves in the foot.

whirled

Which author(s) are you referring to?

If you don't want to lose time and bandwidth for fonts you can't use as is, why don't you have a look at the character map first ?

The kind of font you're talking about are usually marked as 'Demo', just above the download button.

That's 2 reasons why I don't really understand your complaint.

Maybe a checkbox in the search engine to exclude 'Demo' fonts could be an idea...

Apart from the dingbats fonts, it needs to have at least the 26 A to Z letters, and that's all. A font with less characters won't make it through.

I thought it is a policy here to have at least a complete A-Z or a-z in submitted fonts.