Free font families and international fonts

Most fonts available on the net are badly designed, poorly hinted, and have broken encoding vectors. Furthermore, they don't come in complete families, which makes them useless for many applications. Finding good quality fonts, be it in Type 1 or TrueType format, seems difficult, especially if you use languages other than those covered by ISO 8859-1. Here are a few links to satisfactory font families.

These fonts come for free, but some are not Free. Please read their license, use them legally, and remember that you take full responsibility for any legal issues that might ensue.

These links are offered with no guarantee. Not even of any kind.

• The X11 distribution comes with:
  • IBM Courier, in Type 1 format. This family covers ISO 8859-1 to 3 and 9, and includes some linedrawing characters and dingbats;
  • Adobe Utopia, in Type 1 format. This family only seems to cover ISO 8859-1;
  • Bitstream Charter and Courier, in Type 1 format. These families cover ISO 8859-1 only;
  • Bitstream Charter and Courier, in Speedo format. These families cover ISO 8859-1 and almost all of 2, and include some linedrawing characters and dingbats.
• URW++ have made a set of three high quality font families (Antiqua, Nimbus and Grotesq) available under the GPL. They come in Type 1 format. They are disrtibuted with GhostScript and are also available from CTAN in the directory fonts/psfonts/urvf/. These fonts only cover ISO 8859-1.
• The HP FontSmart site proposes a few very pleasant but badly instructed (hinted) font families in TrueType format. They cover ISO 8859-1, 2, 15 and almost all of 9 (`g with breve' is missing).
• Microsoft typography offers a few technically excellent fonts from Monotype and Microsoft in TrueType format. The ones marked `WGL4' cover ISO 8859-1 to 5, 7, 9, and 15, as well as all the Koi charsets and some linedrawing characters and dingbats (in other words, they cover more or less all European languages written using Latin, Cyrillic, or monotonic Greek characters, as well as Turkish). One of them, Verdana, even contains glyphs for the Latin-based Vietnamese script. (Note that the files marked `Windows 3.1' are actually ZIP archives, and may be unpacked on Unix systems). You may not redistribute these fonts.
• Daniel Will-Harris offers two variants of Bitstream's Geometric SlabSerif. These fonts come in TrueType format and cover ISO 8859-1 only.
• Antykwa Torunska is a font family digitized by Janusz Marian Nowacki that covers ISO 8859-1 and 2. The original version, in Type 1 format, is available from CTAN in the directory fonts/psfonts/polish/antyktor/. You should avoid the TrueType version, which has a `cmap' rigged for some other window system.
• The Junius Junicode font comes in TrueType format, and covers ISO 8859-1 to 4 and 9, and also contains a number of characters used in Anglo-Saxon (Old English). Note that this is not a complete font family, but only a single Roman Serif font. You should avoid the other Junius fonts, which have rigged `cmap's.
• Adam Twardoch has collected a number of links to free fonts to download.
• The Bitstream Cyberbit font is no longer available.

Juliusz Chroboczek.

Copyright © 1998-1999 by Juliusz Chroboczek

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