Font Licensing for Generated Graphics: What OFL Permits

Two teams, same font, same week. One is burning captions into a batch of finished export videos. The other is building an editable ad-template product — the kind a customer opens, swaps the headline, and re-exports themselves — and that template embeds the actual font file so the customer's own edit still renders correctly. Both teams are "using a font in generated graphics." Only one of them has a licensing question worth asking, and most people can't tell you which one without looking it up.

That's the actual shape of font licensing for AI-generated work: the default case carries no obligation at all, and the exception is narrower and more specific than the anxiety around it suggests. It's a usage rights question like any other — what matters is exactly what you're doing with the asset, not the vague sense that "AI" makes the question different.

What the license actually grants

Most fonts available for this kind of work — including the overwhelming majority of what ships in free font libraries and design tools — are licensed under the SIL Open Font License. OFL 1.1's own grant is broader than most teams assume: permission "to use, study, copy, merge, embed, modify, redistribute, and sell modified and unmodified copies" of the font, subject only to a small set of conditions. Read plainly, that's not a font you're merely allowed to render text with — it's a font you could legally embed in a product, modify, and resell outright, provided you meet those conditions. The license was written to be permissive by design, not to be tolerated reluctantly.

The one restriction that actually bites

The condition that matters in practice is the Reserved Font Name clause: no modified version of the font may use the original's Reserved Font Name unless the copyright holder grants explicit written permission. TikTok Sans is a clean real-world example of exactly this. TikTok open-sourced the typeface under OFL 1.1 — genuinely free, genuinely open, usable and even modifiable under the license's normal terms. What you can't do is take a modified version of it and ship it still calling itself "TikTok Sans" without ByteDance's sign-off. The permission to modify is real; the permission to keep the name on a modified result isn't automatic.

That's the entire shape of the restriction: it governs what you can call a modified font, not what you can render with an unmodified one. Nothing in that clause reaches a design, an image, or a video that simply uses the font to display text.

Why rendering text almost never triggers anything

The reason the first team above — burning captions into an exported video — has no licensing question is that OFL already addresses exactly that use case directly. Per the license's own FAQ, an OFL font can be embedded in a document, in full or as a subset, and the restrictions on font modification and redistribution do not apply, because the font isn't being distributed as a standalone product — it's part of the document it's embedded in. A generated image with text rendered in an OFL font, or a video with an OFL-based caption style burned into every frame, is precisely that kind of embedded use. The font isn't being extracted, resold, or handed to anyone as a font file — it's being used to produce pixels, which is the ordinary, unrestricted purpose the license exists to permit for free.

Where an obligation actually attaches

The second team's question is real, and it comes down to three specific situations where OFL's permissive default stops being automatic:

1. Redistributing the font file itself. A template product that embeds the actual font — a Canva-style file, an editable design asset, anything a customer opens and the font travels with — is font redistribution, not mere use. OFL permits this too, but it requires the license text to travel with the font and blocks renaming a modified version under the original's Reserved Font Name.
2. Modifying and renaming. Altering letterforms, subsetting aggressively, or otherwise changing the font and then shipping it under the original name without permission is the one clear violation the license spells out.
3. Using a non-OFL font the same way. A purchased commercial typeface, or a "free for personal use" font pulled from a site that isn't the license holder, doesn't carry OFL's terms just because it looks similar. Bundling one of those into a redistributable template depends entirely on that specific font's own — often stricter, often non-free-for-commercial — license.

Case three is where most real exposure actually lives, not case one or two. Most teams working with OFL fonts directly are fine by construction; the risk concentrates in fonts sourced from somewhere that never granted OFL terms in the first place.

Sourcing safely

This is where source matters more than instinct. Google Fonts only adds fonts that are open source and free for commercial use, which means pulling from that specific catalog resolves the licensing question before it's asked — anything there is safe for the embedding and rendering use cases above by construction. The judgment call reappears the moment a font comes from somewhere else: a font marketplace, a "free download" site, or a system font whose lineage predates the open-font movement entirely. Those need a specific check, not an assumption borrowed from how OFL fonts behave.

Auditing Versely's own font list

Versely's caption-style library is a useful real example, because it's a mixed set rather than a single clean category. Of the 23 fonts available for caption styles and listed on the fonts page, nineteen — Inter, Montserrat, Poppins (regular and bold), Open Sans, Oswald, TikTok Sans, Playfair Display, Lora, Merriweather, Bebas Neue, Anton, Righteous, Lobster, Dancing Script, Pacifico, Caveat, Satisfy, and Great Vibes — are open fonts in the OFL lineage, the same family Google Fonts draws from. The remaining four — Arial, Times New Roman, Impact, and Courier New — are classic system fonts with their own long-standing distribution terms that predate OFL and sit outside it entirely, bundled with operating systems for general display use rather than released as open font software.

For the actual job Versely's caption tool does — rendering a chosen font as burned-in text on an exported video — that split doesn't change the answer. Every one of the 23 is being used to produce pixels in a finished export, not extracted and redistributed as a font file, which is exactly the embedded, unrestricted use case both OFL and standard system-font distribution terms are built to allow without a separate license conversation. The distinction in this piece only becomes relevant the day a team wants to go further — bundling the font file itself into a template product rather than just rendering with it — and at that point, checking which of the 23 is OFL-based versus a system font determines which set of terms actually applies.

FAQ

Do I need to credit a font when I use it in a generated design?

No. OFL's license-preservation requirement applies to redistributing the font software itself, not to designs or exports made using it. A generated image or video with text rendered in an OFL font carries no attribution obligation.

What exactly is a Reserved Font Name?

The specific name a font's copyright holder protects from appearing on modified versions. You can generally use, embed, and even modify an OFL font, but a modified version can't be redistributed under the original's protected name without the holder's written permission.

Is it fine to use a system font like Arial in AI-generated graphics?

For standard rendering and export use, yes — system fonts have shipped for general display purposes for decades under terms that cover exactly that. The question changes only if the actual font file gets bundled into a redistributable product rather than used to produce an image or video.

Does using Versely's caption fonts require a separate font license?

No. Burning a caption font into an exported video is embedded, non-redistributable use — the case both OFL and standard system-font terms already permit without any additional licensing step, regardless of which of the 23 available fonts is used.