Go to the previous, next chapter.

Where can I get ... fonts.

Before I go any farther, let me extol the virtues of the Archie servers. If you need to find something on the net, and you have any idea what it might be called, Archie is the place to go. In North America, telnet to ``archie.rutgers.edu'' and login as ``archie''. There are many other servers around the world, any Archie server can give you a list of other servers. There are better documents than this to describe Archie and you should be able to find them from the above starting point. If you have trouble, feel free to ask norm (via Email please, no need to clutter comp.fonts with a query about Archie ;-).

In addition to the telnet option, several archie clients exist including a very nice X11 implementation (Xarchie).

If you know of other archive sites (the above list is no where near complete) or other formats that are available on the net, please let us know.

The sites above represent places where shareware and public domain fonts are available. Many, many typefaces are not available in shareware form. And many shareware faces are less than adequate for a variety of reasons, particularly at small sizes. It seems to be the consensus of the comp.fonts community that ``you get what you pay for.'' If you need a professional quality font, you should probably buy it from a professional.

The list of font vendors in Appendix A (annotated with information about non-Roman alphabets) was contributed by Masumi Abe. Masumi was Adobe's Manager of Typographic Marketing for Asia. He has since left Adobe.

Many font CDs are now available which offer many fonts for a low cost/font.


Excerpted from The comp.fonts FAQ, Copyright © 1992-96 by Norman Walsh