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Finding and using free fonts

January 21, 2009

This article was contributed by Bruce Byfield

Free and open source software (FOSS) has produced several off-shoots, including the Open Access Movement for academic literature and the Free Hardware Foundation. As the FOSS desktop matures, one of the most important off-shoots is the free font movement. Designing free, general-purpose typefaces and font tools, this loosely organized group of typographers is starting to make graphic design on FOSS easier, and to give ordinary users a more aesthetic desktop. The only catch is that you sometimes have to dig to find the free typefaces and tools, and knowing how to use them appropriately frequently requires expert knowledge about what to look for.

Free fonts have been released under a variety of licenses. As the Free Software Foundation points out on its license page, standard FOSS licenses like the GNU General Public License (GPL) are not really designed for fonts. In particular, the fact that fonts are embedded in a document means that the GPL is suitable only if the document is also released under the GPL unless an exception is added to the license.

Another problem is that many font designers do not want to see their work bundled on a CD by a third party. To provide at least a token solution to this concern, many free typographers now favour the SIL Open Font License, a GPL-compatible license developed by SIL International, a Christian academic organization concerned with literacy and the preservation of minority languages.

Whatever their license, free fonts come in three different file formats: Postscript (.pba, .pfm, .inf, and .atm), TrueType (.ttf), and OpenType (.otf). TrueType is the most common, although OpenType is rapidly gaining. All three work on GNU/Linux systems, although some programs might not take full advantage of OpenType's features. Those still in development may come in the format for FontForge (.sfd), the main free software tool for designing fonts, and require you to load the raw files into FontForge so that you can output them to one of the three main file formats, a process roughly equivalent to compiling source code.

Where to get free fonts

Many major distributions include free fonts in their repositories, and include them in basic installations. Ubuntu, in particular, is rich in free fonts in order to supplement its multi-language support. However, as with any software, distribution packages can sometimes be slow to include the latest versions, or all the available free fonts.

Those who want the widest selection of free license fonts (as opposed to fonts that are simply free for the download), can find them at:

  • Open Font Library: A sister-site to the Creative Commons' Open Clip Art Library, the Open Font Library is the largest single repository of free fonts, with over 100 selections — a small number compared to proprietary fonts, but a much larger number than even a few years ago. The site includes users' reviews, tags, and ratings, as well as remixes of various fonts.
  • SIL Font Downloads: This is the main site for free fonts for language support, especially for minority languages, but also for the full range of western and eastern European languages, Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew. Some of these typefaces are so obscure that only specialists will use them regularly, but they include a number of general purpose fonts for English and other western European Languages, such as Gentium, Charis SIL and Doulos SIL.
  • Raph Levien's fonts:A maintainer for GhostScript, Raph Levien also designs some of the best free fonts for everyday use. Be warned, though, that these are works in progress, and some are not be completely ready for use.
  • Linux Libertine: Linux Libertine is designed as a free replacement for the ubiquitous Times Roman. Its letters are designed to have the same proportions as those of Time Roman, so that, when a recipient's machine replaces Linux Libertine in a document with Times Roman, your document's design does not suffer.
  • Liberation fonts: A set of three fonts designed as free replacements for Times Roman, Arial/Helvetica, and Courier — respectively the most commonly used serif, sans serif, and monospace fonts used on Windows.
  • DejaVu: DejaVu is a version of the Bitstream Vera family, one of the first free fonts. The main difference is that it includes support for a greater number of international characters.

Installing free fonts

Once you download free fonts, the easiest way to install them in GNU/Linux is with the font installer included in KDE's setup tool. Using KDE's font installer, you can make selected fonts available to all users on the system, or just the current one, as well as previewing all installed fonts. The installer makes fonts available to the X Window System, not just KDE, so you can use the fonts it installs regardless of your choice of desktops.

If you do not have KDE installed, then you can use a font manager such as Fonty Python or FontMatrix. Both these applications enable or disable fonts on the fly for your current account, and allow you to group fonts in sets — for instance, the fonts you need for a certain project — so that you do not clutter your system with seldom-used fonts, and can enable or disable related fonts with a single action. Of the two, FontMatrix has an edge because of its cleaner interface and its ability to print out sample fonts for easy reference.

In programs like OpenOffice.org or LaTeX, you can install fonts only for that program. However, so long as a program can read system fonts, installing for a single program hardly seems worthwhile.

The use of free fonts

Whether free fonts are useful depends very much on your needs. If language support is your priority, you have hundreds to choose from, with those from SIL International being among the highest quality. Typically, the files for such fonts are much larger than those for traditional fonts, because they contain hundreds of additional Unicode characters — for example, SIL Doulos checks in at one and a half megabytes, as opposed to about 50 kilobytes for all the files associated with a postscript font — but on a recent hard drive, this increased size should not be much of a problem.

[Times Roman style fonts]

If compatibility with the fonts on another operating system is your concern, you have several choices, including Linux Libertine, the Liberation fonts, and SIL Doulos. Of these choices, Linux Libertine is probably the more aesthetically pleasing, although you may prefer SIL Doulos if international character support is also a concern.

Other fonts are useful for a specific need. For instance, Deja Vu or Vera Sans are not among the best-designed fonts, but their large size and wide letters make them well-suited for online display because they are highly readable and easy on the eyes.

However, if you want everyday fonts for documents, your choices are still relatively limited compared to those you have when using proprietary fonts. Many free font designers, like font designers in general, prefer to design decorative fonts that have limited use, and are not suitable for large blocks of text or, at best, anything more than a heading. If you exclude the poorly designed fonts that have always accompanied the average distribution, such as Nimbus or Lucida, at most you have maybe a couple of dozen choices for everyday use, as opposed to the hundreds available in proprietary fonts.

[Text fonts]

Of the workday choices that are available, the most aesthetically pleasing text fonts include Goudy Bookletter 1911 and Raph Levien's Century Catalog and LeBe, the incompleteness of the last one not withstanding. Perhaps the strongest choice is Gentium, an award-winner that, with its calligraphic influence, is among the most beautiful fonts ever.

[Monospace fonts]

For heading fonts, choices are even scarcer, although you might use Levien's LeBe Titling. Levien's Museum Caps looks promising as well, although no download is currently posted on his site. The available monospace fonts are also hard to find, although you might look at OCR-A, NotCourier-sans or Rursus Compact Mono.

Until high quality free fonts for common uses become more numerous, the FOSS desktop is unlikely to attract large numbers of designers. Still, the free fonts that are available are a start, and an improvement over what was available as recently as two years ago. As with the FOSS desktop itself, the choices are only going to improve. But, for now, the choices are limited and restricting for professional designers who would prefer to use only free fonts. Before too many projects have passed, the average designer will almost be forced into importing fonts from Windows, or else buying proprietary typefaces from vendors such as Adobe, just to get some variety.


Index entries for this article
GuestArticlesByfield, Bruce

to post comments

Linux Libertine Rules!

Posted Jan 22, 2009 3:14 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (10 responses)

Of the fonts mentioned, one stands head and shoulders above the rest, in completeness and beauty. I have set my desktop to use Linux Libertine everywhere, and my browser to use it in place of any fonts specified on web pages. I can't understand why it's not installed and used by default on all distributions. (Gentium may have valid uses, but it looks awful in my browser.) I can't understand, in particular, why anyone would use the Liberation or Deja Vu serif fonts any more, for anything.

A detail... I have altered my copy to use the looped s_t and c_t ligatures by default. I wish there were a way to get the font handling code in Gnome to do that without altering the font files. Is there?

Linux Libertine Rules!

Posted Jan 22, 2009 9:22 UTC (Thu) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (1 responses)

> Our fonts cover the codepages of Western Latin, Greek, Cyrillic (with
> their specific enhancements), Hebrew, IPA, etc.

This is the answer -- they support almost nothing except for Western European languages. Would be totally useless not only for me (a Czech), but especially for many people eastwards and southwards.

Linux Libertine Rules!

Posted Jan 22, 2009 9:36 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

Have you tried it? The web page is not always completely up to date. Looking at the map in FontForge, I see an enormous number of Roman-derived glyphs I never see in western European text.

Linux Libertine NOT Rules!

Posted Jan 22, 2009 9:54 UTC (Thu) by sasha (guest, #16070) [Link] (5 responses)

And even with "supported" charsets, such as Cyrillic, there is a common problem with quality. The fonts may be perfect in their Latin part, but it is pain in my eyes when I look on the Russian text written with such a font...

For a pity, the first thing to hack on freshly installed Linux system (for me) is to install MS fonts and explain Fontconfig that it should never, NEVER use DejaVu and friends... Some years ago, it was possible to deinstall DejaVu. Now, package management does not allow to install Gnome/KDE/OOo without these awful fonts.

Linux Libertine is much worse than DejaVu in the Cyrillic charset (hm, I thought it is impossible)...
For Cyrillic, Liberation is better than DejaVu and Linux Libertine, but not enough.

Linux Libertine Could Rule!

Posted Jan 22, 2009 10:44 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (4 responses)

I have found Philipp very easy to work with. If you are dissatisfied with his rendering of the Cyrillic glyphs, why not work with him to improve them, instead of complaining? Surely you don't expect a German to be expert in the esthetics of Cyrillic type?

This does call attention to what seems like a deficiency in our font handling: we shouldn't expect a single font to provide the best rendering for all languages. We need a way to mix and match character ranges from multiple fonts, for its default renderings. Maybe OpenType already has this, and we just need code that actually supports OpenType properly.

A side note: my satisfaction with Linux Libertine is as displayed using subpixel rendering on an LCD screen. Be sure to turn on this option, and anti-aliasing using it.

Linux Libertine Could Rule!

Posted Jan 22, 2009 12:16 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (3 responses)

We do in fact mix fonts transparently (unlike some other platforms). That was always fontconfig's main selling point.

However, proliferation of fonts that only cover a few unicode blocks is user-unfriendly, and quickly overcomes the font management capabilities of humans. (it's about the same phenomenon as toolkip proliferation before GNOME and KDE started producing well-integrated consistent wholes)

Fonts with wide unicode support are still the best solution if done right. And since this article is about free fonts, anyone can step up to improve part of them if he feels they're not good enough.

Linux Libertine Could Rule!

Posted Jan 22, 2009 21:31 UTC (Thu) by spitzak (guest, #4593) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes it is possible to "mix" fonts, but the current way fontconfig/pango/etc does it is pretty useless and makes Linux as bad as Windows and considerably worse than OS/X.

Users think of choosing a single "font" and the font is called some SHORT and PORTABLE (to Windows) name like "Times", and the existence is controlled by the existence of a single file called "Times.ttf" on their computer. And if some Chinese glyph is not in that font, the user does NOT think this means "draw that glyph as a box". They want it to mean "draw the default version of that Chinese glyph".

Instead fontconfig should take a single name for a font. All glyphs not in that font file are instead taken from the "fallback set" of font files. This fallback set could be defined with some enormously complex config file (it likely also defines how to compose letters from the selected font, and might make decisions about obliqueing any letters if the chosen font is italic, etc). But this complexity is hidden from users as they never change it, they just choose fonts from the nice list of short string names.

In addition programmers do NOT want to use Pango and define "font sets" just so they can have a reasonable chance of printing a large number of Unicode glyphs. A "font set" is not portable and does not cleanly store in a small string that can be shown to the user or work cross-platform! Fontconfig/Xft and the Cairo "toy" interface should be fixed so that a font can be chosen with a small and reasonably-portable string and all glyphs appear (from the above font fallback) ALL THE TIME!

Linux Libertine Could Rule!

Posted Jan 22, 2009 22:03 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

Yes, spitzak has elaborated clearly on what I had in mind. It might not actually help sasha, for the case of cyrillic characters, because Libertine actually has those characters, and sasha dislikes them. It's easy to imagine complicated ways to satisfy him, but complicated ways are unsatisfactory. It would be better all around for fonts to include only attractively rendered glyphs, and for fonts to have consistent, attractive glyphs for as many code points as possible. Perhaps this means Philipp should pull the cyrillic glyphs from his releases until they can be brought to match the (superb!) quality of his roman-based glyphs. (I am not myself equipped to evaluate the quality of his cyrillic glyphs.) Then sasha would see, under spitzak's scheme, whatever he chose as the default for those code points.

Linux Libertine Could Rule!

Posted Jan 23, 2009 10:27 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

"This fallback set could be defined with some enormously complex config file"

You decided to ignore the army of fairies that would be required to maintain such a config file. This kind of static aliasing design only ever works when your font offering is static and limited, which is not the case on modern systems.

I want a pony too.

PS: pango and fontconfig have been heavily inspired by the CSS font resolution mechanism, so your "toy" interface is what powers the web today. 1:1 fontname <=> font file selection just does not scale

Linux Libertine Rules!

Posted Jan 23, 2009 12:39 UTC (Fri) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link] (1 responses)

I can't understand, in particular, why anyone would use the Liberation or Deja Vu serif fonts any more, for anything.

Because some of us like the look of them. I wouldn't dream of using Deja Vu for print, but for screen use (particularly, web browsing), the serif version gives very clean, easy to read text. For print, I'm rather fond of Day Roman, but it's not great on screen.

Linux Libertine Rules!

Posted Jan 23, 2009 18:52 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

It's true that the Deja Vu fonts are good on a low-resolution and monochrome displays.

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 22, 2009 4:59 UTC (Thu) by lordsutch (guest, #53) [Link]

One suggested addition: Levien's <a href="http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html">Inconsolata font</a> is a very nice fixed-width typeface in my experience, particularly on screens with subpixel rendering like LCDs.

It's Raph Levien, not Ralph

Posted Jan 22, 2009 6:04 UTC (Thu) by Per_Bothner (subscriber, #7375) [Link] (1 responses)

See http://www.levien.com/.

It's Raph Levien, not Ralph

Posted Jan 22, 2009 14:41 UTC (Thu) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]

Indeed, fixed now, thanks!

jake

Other catalogues of free fonts

Posted Jan 22, 2009 8:58 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

See also »Free Font Resources for Free Open Source Operating Systems«
at http://www.geocities.com/hartke01/

GUST, the Polnish TeX Users Group, is also very active in font development and works together with several typographers. You'll find their fonts at
http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/index_html?set_...

Concerning TeX: The venerable page http://www.tug.org/fonts/ about TeX and fonts is slightly out of date. In particular, it doesn't cover XeTeX http://scripts.sil.org/xetex, a SIL project that introduced streamlined usage of OTF fonts and Unicode in the TeX world a few years ago. (Included in most distributions as part of the texlive* packages.)

Best, Joachim

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 22, 2009 10:04 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (2 responses)

1. As others stated, many of the fonts highlighted there are totally useless for world users at large because of their lack of Unicode coverage. The western font design community should really stop thinking the ASCII block is all that matters. No matter how cool they are, a font that only includes about a hundred glyphs is a toy.

2. DejaVu is not bad at all, especially if you use the Freetype autohinter (and not insist like some distros on using the patented bytecode interpreter)

3. Google Droid should be noted too

4. TEX and especially GUST have some good fonts. Unfortunately they don't make a lot of effort to check their licensing, making inclusion in law-abiding distros hard (the Gyre fonts are a very unfortunate example)

5. Debian and Fedora have specific font efforts, with coherent packaging and licensing check rules. Other distros seem to still ignore fonts specificities and perform had'hoc packaging
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Fonts_SIG
http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-fonts/

Fedora in particular is currently performing a complete distro re-packaging and auditing of its fonts, which should land for F11
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Shipping_fonts_in_Fedora_%2...

Automatic font auto-installation is also being implemented
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/AutomaticFontInsta...

6. Many of the font problems users experience on Linux are due to:
- lack of fontconfig support in some apps (causing crashes if a specific font is missing)
- bad fontconfig support (QT/KDE apps often hit by this)
- lack of support for a modern font shaper (pango/cairo): openoffice.org/java...
- old fonts in legacy formats not converted to modern TTF or OTF containers (Type1 fonts are especially bad, as they often need 10s of entries in font lists to do the same job as one opentype font)

7. Good community links:
http://planet.open-fonts.org/
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-fonts-list
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/openfontlib...

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 22, 2009 12:47 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

TEX and especially GUST have some good fonts.
I thought TeX's fonts were in a different format (Metafont) which desktop environments and X11 do not support? Is there a way to turn Metafont typefaces like Computer Modern into Truetype or Opentype? I think it would need to be done separately for a range of sizes, since the shape of Metafont glyphs changes with font size (they are not simply scaled up and down).
Unfortunately they don't make a lot of effort to check their licensing, making inclusion in law-abiding distros hard
I think that TeX Live makes a good effort to include only free software and free fonts, which is why it can be included in Fedora.

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 22, 2009 13:40 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

1. Most TEX users do not realise, but modern TEX (XETEX...) can use TTF/OTF fonts. It has to because that's the formats the rest of the world uses so MF is an evolutionary dead-end. TEX users need to access fonts created by other projects (and other projects need access to TEX fonts)

For this reason recent TEX efforts produce OTF fonts (STIX, TEX Gyre, etc)

2. TEX people have been lax in licensing in the past (so many historic TEX fonts are not clearly licensed or cleanly licensed)

« I will leave texlive aside as an exercise in futility. I may write more about that if/when I ever manage to finish auditing that steaming pile. »¹

and GUST in particular continues to be (unauthorised relicensing of GPL GS fonts to their own pet license: see page 8 of
http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/tex-gyre/afp05.... )

¹ http://spot.livejournal.com/303000.html (Tom Callaway handles licensing problems for Fedora)

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 22, 2009 12:40 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (4 responses)

I've just looked at several of those fonts, and (like every other Free font I've ever seen) they are all unusable without antialiasing, which makes them worthless for on-screen use to me. It's like they have no hinting at all, though I'm aware that good hinting is very hard work, so I expect they've been hinted, just badly.

I've never been able to understand the obsession in the Linux world with having large blurred fonts. A default install of Ubuntu makes my eyes start to hurt within a few minutes from desperately trying to focus on blurry text, but turning off antialiasing means I have to download msttcorefonts in order for text to look even remotely decent. When I was using a CRT I assumed that the people who designed these things were using monitors that rendered them completely differently, but now I have a fairly expensive flatscreen monitor it looks even worse, because everything else is sharper.

Am I seriously the only person in the world who wants on-screen fonts to look sharp and crisp like they do when using most non-Free fonts?

(Exception: Terminus and a handful of other Free *bitmapped* fonts are extemely good)

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 22, 2009 16:46 UTC (Thu) by johnkarp (guest, #39285) [Link]

Are you using freetype's autohinter, or the bytecode interpreter? DejaVu at least is extensively hinted, but none of that work is visible unless you use the bytecode interpreter.

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 23, 2009 0:11 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

What decade are you in? Do you actually have "subpixel smoothing" turned on, on your expensive flatscreen monitor? (It's not on by default, incomprehensibly.) My LCD monitor claims to have 1680x1050 pixels, and the glyphs on it look perfectly sharp. Of course with the wrong font it looks awful, but I've found the fix for that, noted above. Before Linux Libertine I used Vera, and Century Schoolbook before that. I was never satisfied until now.

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 26, 2009 1:39 UTC (Mon) by jlokier (guest, #52227) [Link]

Even sub-pixel hinted glyphs look blurry on a 1680x1050 display (I have one), if you have good eyesight. Compare with non-anti-aliased text, and the difference is stark: edges are white-grey-black versus white-black.

Some people's eyes prefer the non-anti-aliased one. It just stands out more clearly.

Personally I used to dislike that slight blurriness, but eventually I decided it's ok on a screen with very small pixels, because the letter shapes are better.

I still use a bitmap font in my text editor though. I tried anti-aliased text in that, and didn't like it. The bitmap fonts look clearer to my eyes, like the difference between clear glass and slightly frosted glass.

If you think the difference is negligable, consider that GUI elements such as boxes and thin horizontal/vertical lines are still drawn (in current GUIs) an integer number of pixels wide, and exactly on the pixels, because they look noticably clearer than drawing thin lines with an anti-aliased vector renderer at fractional positions.

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 26, 2009 13:08 UTC (Mon) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

Few versions ago Ubuntu changed default font rendering to be more blurry. There is workaround to restore previous rendering, but is still manual workaround, not proper solution. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fontconfig/+bug...
Interesingly, when I switched to Fedora, fonts got sharp as before.

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 22, 2009 13:40 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link]

Ah, I believe PostScript fonts have ".afm" files, not ".atm", or am I forgetting something?

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 22, 2009 17:29 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link] (3 responses)

Whatever happened to the URW-donated Type 1 fonts that mirror the PostScript standard 35 set?

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 22, 2009 18:15 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

They've some of the most forked fonts, appearing in a dozen different forms (or more) in your average distro.

Unfortunately none of the forkers ever tried to consolidate this mess (like DejaVu did for the Vera derivatives), so the result is underwhelming. Many similar fonts with different problems usually still in the dying Type1 format.

The latest iteration is TEX Gyre which might have been it (modern format, good quality), if the GUST people had not blown the licensing bit big time.

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 22, 2009 21:21 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (1 responses)

BTW, some web sites run surveys to try to find out what fonts are actually deployed on user systems

http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-UnixResu...
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Linux_fonts_on_the_web:_CSS...

It's interesting to see Liberation has almost caught up with Arial on Unix systems.

Font usage measures

Posted Jan 23, 2009 0:01 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

Debian's "popularity-contest" package logs font package installation. Of course none of these measures say which are actually used. It's been many years since I used the Nimbus or URW fonts installed, somehow, on all my machines. I might have expunged them if the space cost anything.

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 22, 2009 22:17 UTC (Thu) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link]

My girlfriend is a print production artist. As such, she must use non-free software like Adobe InDesign for page layout.

Commercial fonts are very expensive. I've tried to convince her to investigate some Free fonts because, as a freelancer, she could save a lot of money.

Unfortunately, she says that she (and her clients) are too paranoid about free fonts because of the print quality and many print shops do not have (or have experience using) non-mainstream fonts. She has many horror stories about print shops having all sorts of trouble with fonts. I don't know if the fonts problem are with the font files, the printer software, or the print shops' ignorance.

Resolving these problems becomes even more difficult as many print jobs are sent to print shops in China. So print designers are very conservative and are stuck in a vicious cycle: they won't risk using non-mainstream fonts until print shops get their act together. But the print shops are seemingly too lazy, cheap, and under deadlines to explore new font technology.

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 23, 2009 10:38 UTC (Fri) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

>If you do not have KDE installed, then you can use a font manager such as Fonty Python or FontMatrix.

That all sounds very complicated. For many purposes you can "install" a font by just dropping the TTF/OTF file into ~/.fonts, and it will magically start working.

A few extra resources about open fonts

Posted Jan 23, 2009 17:31 UTC (Fri) by yosch (guest, #4675) [Link] (1 responses)

Great article, here are some open fonts resources which haven't been mentioned in the thread so far:

  • Ed Trager's unifont.org with good classification of the font families by Unicode coverage and licenses. Plus lots of other goodies: TextLayout meeting talks, resources to advocate the OFL to designers...
  • The Debian weekly font review were we run a regular analysis for every font in the archive and provide preview, Unicode coverage, full metadata (more planned)
  • The OFL FAQ with insights and tips on understanding and using the Open Font License.
  • The various font design tools available which can be used alongside fontforge.
From a i18n, free speech, development and A2K perspective, having a quality redistributable and modifiable implementation for each and every script used throughout the world in the form of a font licensed under a community-recognized license is a huge challenge but a very desirable goal. A big kudos to all the community members involved in this effort.

BTW many prefer referring to fonts released under FLOSS licenses as "open fonts" as the "free fonts" exception is widely associated with restricted freeware distribute-but-don't-modify fonts. Not the same thing.

Now to work on increasing the integration of the advanced features of these fonts in the free desktop stack...

A few extra resources about open fonts

Posted Jan 24, 2009 12:30 UTC (Sat) by yosch (guest, #4675) [Link]

Mmm, that would "free fonts" expression instead of "free fonts" exception

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Jan 29, 2009 10:34 UTC (Thu) by bazzargh (guest, #56379) [Link]

Its maybe worth mentioning that there's a new project to create a high-quality Baskerville font, that started a couple of days ago here.

This came out of a call for more free, high quality fonts (and a rather argumentative discussion) on typophile.com; its to be based on a Baskerville revival font donated by James Puckett.

There's not much to see there yet, just a call for interested parties to contact the project lead (Simon Pascal Klein) - if you're a font designer, pitch in. You can see James' original font files if you dig back through the discussion thread.

Another resource: Wine's fonts

Posted Jan 31, 2009 15:49 UTC (Sat) by vinn (guest, #23971) [Link]

Another resource for fonts, and one that's often overlooked, is that the Wine team has developed some unencumbered drop-in replacements for some popular Microsoft fonts. It started with a Marlett replacement mostly developed by TransGaming. Now it includes a courier font, MS Sans Serif, Small Fonts, System, and Tahoma.

OCR-A &#8658; non-free

Posted Jan 31, 2009 19:34 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (1 responses)

All the “free” versions of OCR-A are derived from the CTAN MetaFont package that states: “Free for use but distribution for profit only by arrangement”¹

&#8658; non-commercial clause
&#8658; non-free

¹ http://tug.ctan.org/cgi-bin/ctanPackageInformation.py?id=...

OCR-A + LeBe... = non-free

Posted Jan 31, 2009 20:19 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Also Raph Levien didn't release all his fonts under the OFL, and they are not free till he decides to slap a free license on them.

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Feb 1, 2009 9:39 UTC (Sun) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]

The really useful would be a font-picking tool allowing the user to determine what font and size is used to display this or that string. It would be very valuable to get answers, why that string's font is so ugly and hairy, as well as to remove problem-bringing fonts or disable certain font ranges and sizes.

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Feb 2, 2009 5:17 UTC (Mon) by locallearningpartner (guest, #22541) [Link] (1 responses)

where can i donate free fonts that i made, for sharing and improving by the community.

Finding and using free fonts

Posted Feb 2, 2009 8:48 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

http://www.openfontlibrary.org/ (or any of the various FLOSS forges if you prefer)

Please make sure you upload a zip with a readme describing the history of the font and a suitable license in txt form however.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal_considerations_for_fonts

Fonts legal stuff is such a mess anything without legal documentation is going to be avoided by knowledgeable people.


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