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
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any
person obtaining a copy of this material, to deal in it without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy,
modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of
this material, and to permit persons to whom this material is furnished
to do so, subject to the following conditions:
- The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of this material.
- THIS MATERIAL IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY
CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THIS
MATERIAL OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THIS MATERIAL.