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Ok, if you are coming from Silverlight 3 development like me you will probably fall into this one as well without even knowing it. In Silverlight 3 there were only 9 fonts, and as soon as you select a different font other than the 9 basic fonts then blend would automatically embed them for you. Now in Silverlight 4 Blend doesn’t do that, because now Silverlight can take advantage of system fonts.

Being able to display beautiful fonts within xaml allows the ability to programmatically alter a designed font with gradients and drop shadows applied.

With Blend 4 Beta, these fonts are installed in your system fonts directory, and they are also included in the SketchFlow project templates. That means that these fonts are automatically embedded in any SketchFlow project you create.

Titilium - Very nice sans serif that works well for display. Comes in many weights. I’ve actually used this font a lot in WPF for display and had good luck with it. It’s a little square so it leaves the UI looking a little futuristic if you don’t manage the weights properly.

This is part 1 where I will provide a quick introduction to TrueType, OpenType, Type 1, ClearType, CFF, PostScript outlines, TrueType font collections, obfuscated fonts, and more.

Silverlight will now use any font that it can find on a machine without embedding. For example, in my RIA Services sample, I changed the font to Elysian (a font I have installed) and it picked it up.

However, there is a way around this, if you encrypt the font so that it is not usable then you are arguably not distributing it any more. This process is known as Obfuscation. It is important, however, to point out that you still need a license or permission to use a non-standard font in your work.

In this Silverlight tutorial Allan Muller explains how to use a font that's not a 'Silverlight' font without making it usable outside your application.

You have your design almost in the bag, you have a font that you want to use but how can you use that font in Silverlight. Without distributing a font (which would be illegal unless you had a license to do this) requires you to obfuscate the font. Obfuscating the font means taking the font and converting it into an un-usable format outside your application.