Fonts
→ Good free (as in libre) fonts:
↓ Good free (as in libre) fonts:
The following is a selection of serif and sans serif fonts with generous licenses. The descriptions are displayed using the font; if you don't have the font installed an alternate from your system will be displayed. Following the “Quick Brown Fox” sentence, the characters in parentheses are:
(vertical-bar capital-i lowercase-L one 23456789 zero capital-o)
(vertical-bar capital-i lowercase-L one 23456789 zero capital-o)
Good fonts with libre licenses:
- Gentium - quite attractive multi-lingual serif font
- single weight in regular and italic, excellent unicode support (extended Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts), some ligatures, bold coming “real soon now,” hinting varies at screen resolutions
- License: SIL open font license
- The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dogs. (|Il1234567890O)
- DejaVu - serif, sans serif, sans serif mono, serif condensed, and sans condensed
- Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic
- each family has regular (book), bold, italic (oblique) and bold italic; rather tall x-height (good for screens); some kerning issues (e.g. “Ju”)
- License: here
- The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dogs. (|Il1234567890O)
- URW Fonts:
a collection of high quality fonts
(larger collection: Artifex, under “URW fonts”)
- URWBookmanL, Century Schoolbook L, URWChanceryL, GaramondNo8 (?), URWGothicL, Nimbus Mono L, Nimbus Roman No9 L, Nimbus Sans L, Palatino, URWPalladioL, URW-Standard Symbols L, URW-Symbol-medium, URW-Zapf Chancery, URW-Zapf Dingbats
- most have book and demibold, some in light
- License: GPL, ReadMe (originally released with GhostScript: GNU, GhostScript.com; extended by Valek Filippov)
- The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dogs. (|Il1234567890O)
- Linux Libertine - serif
- includes glyphs for western latin, greek, cyrillic, IPA, and more
- Typophile discussion
- License: GPL and OFL
- The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dogs. (|Il1234567890O)
- Bitstream Vera - serif, sans serif, and sans serif mono
- rather tall x-height (good for screens)
- License: here
- The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dogs. (|Il1234567890O)
- Junicode - serif created for medievalists (but works well for those born later)
- nearly complete Latin Unicode, semi-tall line height
- License: GPL
- The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dogs. (|Il1234567890O)
Fonts with varying licenses:
- Bitstream Cyberbit - serif
- very tall line height
- License: here (.wri file)
- The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dogs. (|Il1234567890O)
- Liberation Sans - serif, sans serif, and mono
- License: GPL+ exceptions
- The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dogs. (|Il1234567890O)
- Fertigo
- Fontin
- Fontin Sans
- Delicious
- Lido - similar to “Times”
- License: here (varies for multiple computers or publishing)
- The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dogs. (|Il1234567890O)
→ Programmer fonts:
↓ Programmer fonts:
- Proggy Fonts - mono (.ttf .pcf .fon), my fav is Proggy Clean Slashed 0
- ProFont and Sheldon - all characters easily differentiated, works well at tiny point sizes
- Keith Deven's list - long list of links with brief commentary
→ Unicode & UTF-8 Fonts:
↓ Unicode & UTF-8 Fonts:
- Gentium - quite attractive multi-lingual serif font, single weight in regular and italic, excellent unicode support (extended Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts), some ligatures, (SIL open font license)
- Junicode - midieval (GPL?)
- Bitstream's Cyberbit
- Wikipedia on Unicode Fonts
- Code 2000
- Everson Typography: European alphabets
- Alan Wood
- Midieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI): varying licenses
- Unifont Guide for Open Source
- Stix fonts
- UTF-8 sampler
- UTF-8 fonts
- Unicode Consortium
→ Collections of Free (mostly libre) Fonts:
↓ Collections of Free (mostly libre) Fonts:
- dafont - free and GPL fonts (some retail?)
- Larabie Fonts - ttf are free but PostScript & OpenType are commercial
- 25 free fonts - some free, others free for non-commercial use
- 1001 Free Fonts
- MastersTech
- FryFonts - free
- Tom7 - funky free fonts
- MS's Core fonts - for Linux
- Chank's free fonts
- Smashing Magazine
→ Collections of Free (gratis), Shareware, & Commercial Fonts :
↓ Collections of Free (gratis), Shareware, & Commercial Fonts:
- Wanted Fonts - freeware and shareware
- Letramania - (Spanish)
- Font Freak - free and shareware fonts
- Font Garden
- Search Free Fonts: categories
- Luc Devroye's font info: large collection of font info, including math fonts
- Scholar's fonts
- Font Files - no longer updated?
- Aenigma
- Yamada - guide to non-English fonts
- Web Page Publicity
Mostly Commercial Fonts
- Font Pool - mostly commercial
- Simply the Best - mostly free for personal use, otherwise commercial
Sites with links to fonts:
- dmoz - links to fonts
- Font Leech links
- Web Page Design For Designers - links to fonts
- Font Lover - blog about font sites
→ Font Design, Font Tools, & Misc. Info:
↓ Font Design, Font Tools, & Misc. Info:
- Thinking with Type - font design articles
- The FontSite - font and typographic articles
- Font use cross-platform compatibility
- Fontifier - create font from your own handwriting
- Fonts for Flash
- Font Freak - font tool links
- Insight - font design articles
- Lines and Splines
- Sigmund Utility
- Sign Language
- Think Box
- Typographer
- Typographica
- U&Lc
- alt.binaries.fonts - FAQ
- comp.fonts - FAQ
- Times (new) Roman
- Type Culture
- Typophile - blog?
- Web Typography
- Type Index - no longer updated?
Identify Fonts:
- Identifont - describe a font
- What the Font? - upload a graphic of a font for identification
→ Font Kerning - AveLToTiFefifoAWAYo:
↓ Font Kerning - AveLToTiFefifoAWAYo:
Font kerning is the spacing between different pairs of characters, and can vary wildly in different fonts. Some people notice poor kerning easily, for others the effect is less conspicuous. Ideally, the flow of words during reading is uninterrupted by letter-pair aberrations. Of course some combinations of letters rarely occur in words, so if “qe” or “fR” do not look right there is little need for concern (although in every font “LOL” always looks funny to me). A short character combination that can display problem kerning is: “AveLToTiFefifoAWAYo.”
The following lines show every possible pairing of 1) lowercase (minuscule) characters, 2) a capital (majuscule) followed by a lowercase character, 3) capitals. Lines with typically narrow characters (e.g. “i” and “l”) have been padded for proportional fonts. Lines with wide characters (i.e. “m” and “w”) have been left to dangle. When kerning is one of the criteria for selecting fonts for a particular work, you could copy and paste these lines into a word processor and apply different fonts to help determine acceptability. Monitors tend to have poor resolution (80-120 dpi) compared to print (300+ dpi), so it is suggested that you print the samples and critique on paper rather than on a screen. An alternative is to zoom in to perhaps 400% or 600% so that the distortive effects of pixel width play a smaller role.
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ZAZBZCZDZEZFZGZHZIZJZKZLZMZNZOZPZQZRZSZTZUZVZWZXZYZZZ
For more information, see the Wikipedia article on kerning.
(The above have only randomly occurring acrostics and word searches.)
→ Disclaimer:
↓ Disclaimer:
Font license agreements should be verified before use. Some licenses are quite nuanced regarding commercial use.
Marginalia
→ Font References:
↓ Font References :
- About Fonts
- Font Browser
- ISO 8859-1 - Latin 1 & Unicode entities