Fonts
June 8th 2009 02:32 pm
So I was reading through programming.reddit.com yesterday when I happened upon an article detailing various available free fonts.
This is free-as-in-beer for the most part but the article seems to be good at mentioning the license (i.e. non-commercial, SIL license, etc.)
I’m enjoying Titillium (SIL Open Font License 1.1) (page in Italian) and Aller (Noncommercial use EULA, this post clarifies allowable use) (page in Danish) so far.
There’s also good programming (monospaced) fonts out there. I remember back before GNOME secured the release of Bitstream Vera that pretty much the only choice for programming fonts on X11 was “fixed” or Courier. Nowadays we have a slew of good fonts available. Quite a few are listed in this Hivelogic post, although about half are not freely available. I do agree with the choice of Inconsolata though. One other good monospaced font I would mention is Envy Code R (free to use but redistribution prohibited).
The only problem I’ve noticed so far is that the Aller font is rendered with spaces elided in some situations (notably JuK’s track announcement popup), which I can’t figure out.
Are there other good, free fonts out there that I’m missing?
DejaVu Mono is very good. Clean, large unicode coverage, a good chunk of it has hinting instructions.
What, no Terminus?
At first I didn’t think it was very beautiful, but after using it a while I find it easier to read than other monospace fonts I’ve used. Not sure about its license though.
This Terminus? http://fractal.csie.org/~eric/wiki/Terminus_font
I’m not a big fan of bitmapped fonts to be honest, maybe later once my eyesight finally gives out for good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts
+1 for terminus, give it a chance. I’d like to use Inconsolata but it doesn’t look very good on my screen unless I make it _very_ big (18 points minimum).
Yep, also see this site: http://www.is-vn.bg/hamster/
Here’s a screenshot from irssi: http://hanswchen.wordpress.com/files/2009/06/terminus.png
Probably the highest-quality free font is Libertine, a beautiful serif Antiqua that makes a great replacement for Times or Hoefler Text. The same project has recently released a first version of a sans-serif called Biolinum.
Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic are also spectacular fonts.
Eike: Libertine is indeed a very nice serif font. I don’t like Biolinum quite as much as some of the other sans-serifs but the quality is indeed good, thanks for the suggestions.
Here is another good site for free fonts:
http://www.creamundo.com
The owner created them all by himself, and their all under a free license.
I think the collection is more 9000 fonts large.