How to Get the Best Free Fonts

Category: Fonts | Comment 2 Comments | Read 5271 Read | Posted Posted: VistaTrick | 12 November 2007

Despite all the new fonts included with Windows Vista, you can give your documents a fresh look if you investigate and employ other fonts that are out there that most Vista users don't have.

Unfortunately, if you query a search engine for free fonts, you’re likely to get a huge list of web sites that have truly horrible products. These include decorative, novelty, and fan- tasy typefaces that might be useful once in a rare while — a haunted house party, for example — but should never be used in most documents. There’s nothing wrong with novelty fonts, if they’re well done — but most such fonts aren’t.

What you should look for, even in free fonts, are typefaces with at least four weights: roman, bold, italic, and bold italic. These fonts should be hinted so they look good on screen and when printed on an ordinary inkjet or laser printer.

Avoid fonts that don’t have a full complement of weights or seem to be hasty rip-offs of professional typeface families. There are many good-quality free fonts to be had. If you need to buy commercial, licensed fonts, there are many affordable options for sale (as we explain later in this chapter).

The 20 Best Free Fonts

Vitaly Friedman compiles what is arguably the best list, complete with sample images, of high-quality TrueType and OpenType fonts that are free for the downloading.

Friedman’s lists fluctuates over time between about 20 and 25 winners, as he periodically adds new fonts and deletes fonts that turn out to be stolen copies of commercial fonts. It’s fascinating to visit his list every few months and watch the ebb and flow of type designs, which Friedman treats as his personal friends.

At this writing, Friedman’s No. 1 font selection is named Delicious, shown in Figure 7-15. This is a graceful and professionally drawn font by Jos Buivenga of the Netherlands. Delicious has all the attributes you want in a free font (or any font): a full range of weights — even an extrabold, heavy weight — and characters that are well-formed enough to work in small sizes, such as a document’s footnotes.

The font also has the unusual characteristic that a word or sentence is always the same length, whether the roman, bold, or heavy weight is selected (as shown at the bottom of Figure 7-15). This can be useful if you want to make certain lines of a document bold or nonbold, depending on other variables, without any of the line breaks changing.

Figure 7-15: A Font named Delicious. This typeface family, which can be downloaded free, shows the qualities that make a font worth having (unlike many free fonts, which are garbage).

Friedman’s list of the best free fonts is at www.alvit.de/blog/article/20-best-license-free- official-fonts. Buivenga’s site, which also offers another free sans-serif font named Fontin, is at www.josbuivenga.demon.nl/delicious.html.

Other Free Font Lists

Some other collections of high-quality free fonts — many of which are linked to from
Vitaly Friedman’s site — include the following.

Manfred Klein’s Fonteria — http://moorstation.org/typoasis/designers/klein03/index.htm
Designer in Action — www.designerinaction.de/fonts/show.php?art=fonts
Typemotion — www.typemotion.de/_typographie/lacuna.php

Apostrophic Laboratories — http://apostrophiclab.pedroreina.net/

Identifont — www.identifont.com/free-fonts.html

Some of the best type design work in the world is done outside the United States. As a result, a few of the sites in the preceding list use languages other than English. These sites, however, are so easy to use — all you really need to do is select a font and click a button to download it — that you should have no trouble whether or not you understand the rest of the text on a site.

Identifont, the last site shown in the list, provides a very useful fonts-by-appearance serv- ice. If you’re trying to match a font you’ve seen, but you don’t know its name, how can you obtain the font? The answer is to click the fonts by appearance tab at Identifont, specify which characters you have a sample of, and answer a few simple questions.

These questions include the shape of the lowercase letters, the thickness of horizontal and vertical strokes, and so forth. The site then displays a few fonts that match your answers. Even if the exact font you want isn’t in the results, one of the alternatives may perfectly fit your needs.

The Best Free Scientific Fonts

If you write scientific or mathematical papers, you probably need a specialized font with characters that aren’t natively found in Windows Vista, even with its vast collection of symbols in the Lucida Sans Unicode font.

The answer to this problem is STIX Fonts, a project of the nonprofit Scientific and Technical Information Exchange. Organizations that belong to this consortium include the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), the American Institute of Physics, and others that publish scientific journals.

STIX Fonts include more than 5,000 glyphs, all of which use the numbering convention established by Unicode.

For more information and to download fonts, see http://stixfonts.org.

The Best Programmer’s Fonts

Software developers are wild about monospaced fonts. These are fonts in which every character — even i and w and all of the uppercase letters — are exactly the same width. You might think that proportional fonts — in which i and w are different widths — would be easier for developers to read. But the fixed-width of characters in code can help devel- opers to spot misspelled variables, which may be longer or shorter than expected.

More importantly, developers crave monospaced fonts in which there are distinct differ- ences between characters that look confusingly similar in, say, Arial. This usually means, among other things, that a font designed for use by programmers must add a slash or a dot to the numeral zero (0) to make it clearly different from the letter O.

Trevor Lowing, a software engineer and Navy reservist, defines these differences as fol- lows (we paraphrase):

Crisp, clear characters Extended character set Good use of white space
Easy to distinguish the one (1), the lowercase “el” (l), and the uppercase “eye” (I) Easy to distinguish the zero (0), the lowercase “oh” (o), and the uppercase “oh” (O) Easily distinguished quote marks, apostrophes, and back-quote marks
Clear punctuation characters, especially braces {}, parentheses (), and brackets

Fortunately for programmers everywhere, Lowing has tested numerous monospaced fonts and rates them on his site: http://www.lowing.org/fonts..
At this writing, Lowing’s No. 1-rated developer’s font is Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. This is a free monospaced font created by the well-known Bitstream typeface foundry. See Figure 7-16 for a sample.

For more information, visit www.gnome.org/fonts.
Another site that rates developers’ fonts is maintained by Keith Devens, a PHP program- mer: http://keithdevens.com/wiki/ProgrammerFonts.
Finally, if you need a font that’s been rated highly on several developers’ lists as clear and legible, and you’re willing to pay a few dollars, get Andalé Mono WGL. (The name is pro- nounced ON-da-LAY, Spanish for “let’s go!”). The Ascender Font Store offers a five-user license for this font for only $30 USD. See www.ascenderfonts.com/.

Figure 7-16: Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. This monospaced font has been judged as one of the best for programmers because of its fixed pitch and clearly differentiated characters.

Tip: Try the free Windows Vista Consolas font. Before you download a free monospaced font or purchase a commercial one, try the Consolas font family that’s included in Windows Vista. It not only has useful distinguishing features, such as a slash though the zero, but it also has all of the four weights commonly needed in documents: roman, bold, italic, and bold italic. Lucida Console, which is included in every version of Windows since NT 4, is an alternative if you need to share documents with others who may not have Vista’s fonts. (Lucida Console, however, doesn’t make its zero look differ-
ent from its letter O.)

How to Get the Best Commercial Fonts

There’s nothing wrong with paying for fonts. Sometimes, the perfect font isn’t available for free but only in commercial collections. And professional graphic designers, of course, must keep their designs fresh by constantly purchasing the latest typefaces.

If you’re not a design professional — you just want access to a broad selection of excellent fonts — then a commercial bundle of high-quality fonts is the answer.

Arguably the best value in commercial fonts today is the Cambridge Collection CD by Bitstream. This disc provides 202 fonts in both TrueType and PostScript formats for only USD$199. That’s less than a dollar per font. And these aren’t useless, novelty fonts, either
(although many are headline-style fonts). Most are workhorse text fonts in a full range of weights that work well in business and personal documents of all kinds.

For more information, see www.myfonts.com/products/bitstream/cambridge.

What About a Condensed Font?

Windows Vista, and every Windows version in years past, has lacked a good set of con- densed fonts. These are fonts that are narrower than typical fonts, which means you can fit more words on a line, in a spreadsheet cell, and so forth.

One of the most versatile condensed fonts that Microsoft has ever shipped is named Arial Narrow. This font, which is a rendition of the normal Arial font, but slightly compressed, coordinates well with other sans-serif faces. Used sparingly, only where necessary, a table of figures set in Arial Narrow may look no different to the layperson’s eye than the same table set in Arial (which would be too wide).

Unfortunately, Microsoft has never included Arial Narrow in any build of Windows, not even Vista. The font — with a full range of four weights — has shipped only with Microsoft Office.
If you have Office installed, and Arial Narrow is one of the fonts available to you, be of good cheer. If not, you may need to purchase it commercially.

The best price we’ve found for Arial Narrow is at Fonts.com, a subsidary of Monotype Imaging. Monotype is the foundry responsible for Arial Narrow, so perhaps it makes sense that the best deal on Arial Narrow resides there. Even so, the cost to purchase all four weights in Windows OpenType format is $104 at this writing (see www.fonts.com/findfonts/detail.asp?pid=243201).

What About Font Utilities?

Now that you have all the fonts you need, you may some day want to look inside them, catalog them, and easily pluck characters from them.

That’s what font utilities are good for. The following sections list a few of our favorites.

TrueType Viewer Tool

The TrueType Viewer Tool is a free utility developed by Rogier van Dalen (see Figure
7-17). It opens TrueType and OpenLayout fonts and reveals everything there is to know about a font. That includes its TrueType instructions, control points, and other technical details.

For more information, see http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~slam/fonts/truetypeviewer.html.

Figure 7-17: TrueType Viewer Tool. Rogier van Dalen’s free utility exposes the internals of
Windows fonts for close inspection.

Typograf

Among the ranks of commercial font utilities, Typograf has won kudos for its type man- agement skills.

Whereas Vista provides no facilities to print sample output of all your installed fonts, Typograf not only prints samples, but it can also find any uninstalled fonts you may hap- pen to have on your hard drives, DVDs, CDs, or other media.

The program is available for a 30-day free trial. During this period, watermarks are included on any printouts you make and a dialog box occasionally suggests that you get a paid registration. At this writing, the cost was USD$35. See www.neuber.com/typograph.

PopChar

As a replacement for Windows’ limited CharMap utility, PopChar is a strong contender. The program has a resemblance to CharMap in that you can select special characters from any installed font and insert them into your documents. But PopChar does much more.

PopChar remains in your System Tray, waiting for you to click on it. When its window appears, you click the special character you want and it immediately appears in the doc- ument you were just working in. No copying and pasting needed with PopChar.

The current price is USD$29.99. See www.ergonis.com/products/popcharwin/.