Difficulty: ★☆☆ (easy)
Keywords: fonts, SIL, Google Web Fonts, CTAN, Linux Libertine fonts, DejaVu fonts, Stix fonts

Problem

You need to find professional fonts, preferably released under an open source license which can be used for print or web formats.

Solution

There are some very good fonts which can be used freely. Most fonts are even released under the Open Font License or other free or open licenses. The following list is a small overview which is by no means complete (also use your favorite search engine):

http://scripts.sil.org

SIL is a nonprofit organization for sustainable language development. One part is to “support the use of non-Roman and complex scripts in language development.”SIL creates the Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, Gentium, Andika, and other typefaces. All fonts are released under the Open Font License (OFL). This license was specially created for fonts and was initiated by SIL.

http://fonts.google.com

Google Web Fonts is a huge collection of open source fonts. They can be freely incorporated into your web sites using CSS or can be downloaded and embedded in PDF.

http://www.tug.org/tetex/

The TeTeX distribution and CTAN also contains some high quality fonts, however, mainly aimed at the print business and not for the web.

http://www.linuxlibertine.org

The Linux Libertine fonts are designed to be an alternative to the serif Times fonts. The Linux Libertine and the Linux Biolinum fonts are a collection of serif and sans serif fonts with the usual Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Hebrew glyphs. Additionally, the fonts contain ligatures, true small caps, old style numbers, proportional or monospaced numbers, true superscript and subscript, and much more. A monospace variant is currently being designed.

https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/

The DejaVu font family is derived from the Bitstream Vera fonts. Due to license issues, the font has to be renamed. The fonts now contain lots of glyphs and support Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian, and other languages.

http://www.stixfonts.org

The STIX fonts (Scientific and Technical Information Exchange) is a set of comprehensive fonts for scientific and engineering manuscripts. They can be used both for print and online publishing.

https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/best-free-fonts/

A collection of more than 70 free fonts which are also free for commercial use.

Discussion

Before you use a font, answer the following questions:

  • Supported Languages and Amount of Glyphs. Does your font support your language? Although modern fonts use Unicode these days, your language might not be supported. Especially if you need “uncommon” languages or rarely used glyphs.

  • Missing Styles. Some fonts are published in one style only, usually regular. Such fonts make it more difficult to universally adopt them in different scenarios where more styles (bold, italic, or a combination) are needed.

  • Font Formats. Modern fonts are usually Unicode fonts published in OTF or TTF format. Older fonts are mostly PostScript Type 1 fonts which have a limited amount of glphys (theoretically 256). PostScript fonts cannot be used on the web.

  • Font Combinations. For a non-designer, it is generally easier to use a complete font family conisting of sans serif, serif and monospaced typefaces. The reason for this is that these typefaces are made to match. It is much more difficult to select fonts that suit aesthetically as it needs experience.

  • Quality. This is a broad topic and it heavily depends on where you want to use the font. Is it primarily used for web content or for print only? Or both? Some fonts only look good on a web page, others only go with printed documents. Sometimes the hinting (adjustment of a font to a certain resolution) may or may not be implemented.


Project@GitHubIssue#7