...deletia...
The LHF (& Fred's) arguement was that you could get a guy that lays out the entire alphabet and sends it to you in curves then you can lay out whatever you want. That is ridiculous to me, who is going to do that??
Regardless... as incredible as it sounds, at LHF anyway, according to the EULA... the font licensee is generally forbidden to lay out text and sell that output to a customer..even if converted to curves. Read that again slowly!
This is an artifact of a copyright system that was forged before technology rendered it ridiculous.
They can huff and they can puff but, by their own rules, you're licensed to used a file filled with a specific pattern of 1's and 0's and any subset of any of that collection.
A particular collection of 1's and 0's is whatever you say it is. What if you had, say, an Excel spreadsheet that if interpreted as a jpg became bit for bit a copy of a copyrighted image? Or if interpreted as a font file was bit for bit the image of someone's proprietary typeface?
Does this mean the the proprietor of the copyrighted image or the proprietary font file has some claim to your spreadsheet? Fat chance.
Vendors of fonts, clipart, images, etc, just like audio and video producers, are desperately clinging to a outmoded copyright system designed for a world where generally only the creators of a work possessed the reproduction, duplication, and modification capabilities for that work. That the world has changed but the quaint notion of copyright has not is what leads to bizarre and nonsensical situations.