lxgw/blacksugarplumcandy

Black Sugar Plum Candy is an open-source font in a cute, rounded style, originally shared through a Weibo account and a WeChat public account in 2019 as a way to customize the look of text on a phone. It has since been formally released as its own GitHub repository under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. The font is not built from scratch. It combines pieces of several other open-source fonts, including Source Han Sans by Adobe, M+ FONTS, Jua, Rounded Mgen+, and Gensen Rounded, all of which are themselves licensed under OFL 1.1. The readme is upfront that this is a personal hobby project rather than a professional font product, and it lists a few known limitations: the Chinese characters mostly follow Japanese shape conventions rather than mainland Chinese standard forms, advanced typographic features like vertical text were removed during production, and the Korean character set is inconsistent in style because the base font only covered common syllables, with the rest filled in from a different source font. Because of its OFL 1.1 license, anyone, whether an individual or a company, can use the font freely, including commercially, without paying or asking permission, though the author says a credit would be appreciated. The font can be freely shared, installed on a system, embedded in software or apps, and bundled or resold with other products, as long as the OFL license text travels with it. It can also be modified into a new derivative font, provided that derivative also stays under the same OFL 1.1 terms. The license does not allow selling the raw font files by themselves, and the font cannot be mixed into the same file as fonts under a conflicting license such as the GPL. The readme notes that any earlier, more restrictive sharing terms from its original Weibo and WeChat release no longer apply now that it is open source on GitHub, the OFL license is the only one that governs its use going forward. The font files can be downloaded directly from the repository as a ZIP, from a TTF folder, or through a linked cloud storage mirror.