Fonts and attribution
Two typefaces, both under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, both verified as permitting embedding without restriction. Here is the evidence.
The typefaces
Archivo carries every word on the site and in the planners. JetBrains Mono is used only for measurements and time: hour rails, page dimensions, week numbers and the specification strips.
That split is deliberate. Our differentiator is the measurements, so measurements are set as data.
| Family | Licence | Copyright | Used for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Archivo | SIL Open Font License 1.1 | Copyright 2021 The Archivo Project Authors | Display, UI, body and all planner typography |
| JetBrains Mono | SIL Open Font License 1.1 | Copyright 2020 The JetBrains Mono Project Authors | Hour rails, dimensions, week numbers, spec strips |
Why Archivo
Because it has a width axis, and that is a functional requirement rather than a stylistic one. A seven-day column on Letter portrait is 25.2 mm wide, and on A5 narrower still. Narrowing the letterforms is what lets us keep day names legible instead of truncating them or dropping the type below the legibility floor.
It is also tabular by construction in our build, which matters because a weekly planner is a grid of numbers: seven date numerals across a header, an hour rail down the side, week numbers, month strips. Digits of differing widths visibly rag every one of those columns.
The two licence regimes, and why they differ
The OFL treats embedding a font in a document and distributing the font file itself as different things, and this site does both, so both are handled.
Embedding into a PDF is explicitly permitted. OFL FAQ 1.12 answers it directly: fonts may be embedded in a document in full or as a subset, and the restrictions on modification and redistribution do not apply. FAQ 1.13 confirms that embedding does not change the licence of the document, which is why our planners can carry their own terms.
Serving a font file from our own domain, which we do so the site renders, is distribution rather than embedding, and FAQ 1.11 requires that copyright and licence notices travel with it. So they do: the full licence text for each family is served alongside the fonts, and linked below.
- Archivo licence text/fonts/archivo-OFL.txt
- JetBrains Mono licence text/fonts/jetbrainsmono-OFL.txt
Embedding permission, verified
Every font shipped here was parsed directly and checked for an fsType value of 0x0000 in its OS/2 table, which is Installable Embedding: no restriction, with the no-subsetting and bitmap-only bits clear. That check runs on every build and fails it if a font ever changes.
This is worth doing rather than assuming. Two of the largest free planner sites embed Microsoft proprietary typefaces into files they mass-distribute, which is at best an untested reading of document-embedding permissions when the document is a giveaway produced in bulk. Two others embed no font at all and rely on base-14 substitution, which shifts metrics on non-Adobe viewers and some printers.
How the fonts are prepared
Variable fonts cannot be embedded in a PDF as variable, and the full variable files are far too large to ship, so both families are instanced to fixed points in their designspace and subset to the glyph set we actually draw, at build time.
The web versions are Google-produced Latin subsets served unmodified, which avoids a subtlety: OFL FAQ 2.6 treats self-subsetting a webfont as modification, which carries obligations we would rather not take on for no benefit.