Though there are thousands of free fonts in the Internet, not all the digital fonts are free. Some of them are commercial products, and thus they are offered for money. In this context, font vendor means an individual or business organization that specializes on selling commercial fonts to end users.
As any digital product, such as software application, a movie or song file, a computer font can also be licensed and protected with the copyright. In order to use such font, one should contact either a font developer or a font vendor to purchase the rights for using that font. Sometimes fonts can be free for personal, but not for commercial use. This means you can easily download such font for free, and use it in your own designing projects. However, once you earn money with those projects, the use of that font becomes illegal and you have to purchase it for commercial use.
With the start of digital fonts development in the 70th – 80th of the previous century, the first font vendor pioneers appeared. Among the first font vendors with the world names were Adobe Systems, Apple Computers, and Microsoft. Of course, fonts were not the key business direction for these companies, but still they contributed much to the development of digital fonts, creating major font formats, and building backgrounds for further font industry.
Fonts2u, which is an online font repository focused on free font downloads, also provides some shareware, free for personal use, and demo fonts. Thus, there is a font vendor list on the site with hundreds of font vendors. One can easily find the required font vendor by browsing the alphabetic list and review all the fonts offered by this particular font vendor. Though offering free fonts remains a core task of Fonts2u, we believe font vendor information will also be interesting and useful for designers, who are interested in the commercial use of computer fonts.