Putting a PDF brochure on a website is a common small-site job, and converting it to a web page is the easy part. The fonts are harder to reason about. If the PDF carries a font whose license says no embedding, what does the converter do with it? I tried a set of test files to find out, and the answer was not one thing but three.

What the license flag says

A font with an OS/2 table carries a 16-bit license field there, called fsType. The spec page for that table on learn.microsoft.com, which I read on 2026-10-28, puts the usage permission in bits 0–3 (valid values 0, 2, 4 and 8), a no-subsetting flag in bit 8 and a bitmap-only flag in bit 9.

I scanned the fonts on my Mac. Pacifico, Liberation Sans, Helvetica and Noto Serif SC report 0. Palatino and PingFang SC report 4. Arial and Georgia report 8. I found no installed font with 2, 256 or 512, so for those values I made test copies by editing a font file.…