Getting and Using Good Fonts

From Scribus Documentation Project

Jump to: navigation, search

General

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of places to get fonts on the web. If you google “fonts,” you will get several paid ads for sites selling fonts and dozens more showing fonts for sale.

A well-made and well-designed font takes a lot of skill and time to build, especially an OpenType font with possibly thousands of glyphs. A high-quality Open Source font editor is available in the form of FontForge.ENDNOTE

Many fonts now available in digital form originated in the world of metal type or other now seldom-used forms such as filmstrips. So the fonts you buy today, like Garamond or Clarendon, may have histories going back hundreds of years.

A good font is probably not cheap, and remember the licensing policy that governs your providing fonts to a pre-press shop; they generally need to have licensed copies of the fonts as well. If the license doesn't permit embedding a font in a PDF or PostScript file, you still have the option to convert it to outlines.

If you know where to look, you'll be able to find some excellent fonts for free or even Free. Beware, though, that it's highly unlikely that a free/Free font provides all the font faces of a commercial font offering. Even though a project like the Open Font LibraryENDNOTE is attempting to change this, you probably can't avoid buying a commercial font for some purposes any time soon.

Below is an annotated list of sources for free/Free, cheap and commercial fonts.

Sources

  • There are some great freely licensed URW fonts from Artifex (makers of Ghostscript and GhostPCL) that are well worth grabbing. There are some good quality fonts in there, like Clarendon, URW Bookman, and Antique Olive.
  • The GentiumENDNOTE font family provides excellent serif fonts under the SIL Open Font Licence. It supports Unicode, but so far, only regular and italic are complete.
  • Linux LibertineENDNOTE is an Open Source project, which is working on a Free alternative to proprietary serif fonts, especially Times/Times New Roman. It offers different font faces in otf format. As of this writing, regular and italic are complete, bold, bold italic, underlined and small caps will work for most European languages.
  • LiberationENDNOTE is a set of fonts created on behalf of RedHat. It is intended to serve as a replacement for the Microsoft fonts Times New Roman, Arial and Courier. It is distributed under the GPL v2 plus exception.
  • Jos Buivenga is maintaining a website called exljbris.ENDNOTE His carefully crafted fonts are available for gratis use in Type 1, TrueType and OTF format.
  • The very prolific and very gifted type designer Manfred Klein has put a huge collection of high-quality TrueType fonts on the web at his Fonteria.ENDNOTE Perhaps the best thing about Klein's selection is the large number of good text fonts that take off in subtle ways from classical serif faces. He offers the fonts "free for private and charity use. They are even free for commercial use – but if there’s any profit, pls. make a donation to organizations like 'Doctors Without Borders.'"
  • TypeOasis,ENDNOTE the site that hosts the Fonteria, has nice work by other designers, too.
  • Some free TrueType fonts can also be downloaded from schriftgradENDNOTE which also hosts a good glossary on typography/printing/DTP in German.
  • http://fonts.goldenweb.it/index_file/l/enENDNOTE is a directory with 20 590 free TrueType fonts of mixed quality.
  • http://www.webpagepublicity.com/free-fonts-g.htmlENDNOTE contains 6500 TTF fonts, also free as in beer.
  • Valery Friedman hosts a list of his Free Quality Font Top 25ENDNOTE with some excellent fonts. Updates in Smashing Magazine.
  • Gerrit van Aken'ENDNOTE'ENDNOTE offers links to some excellent fonts and also provides reviews (German).
  • Pedro ReinaENDNOTE has listed 189 freely available fonts, all of them Type 1, TrueType, PC/Mac.
  • Luc DevroyeENDNOTE has a regularly updated list of font foundries and desginers, including those offering free quality fonts.
  • The MS Core TrueType fonts (Sourceforge.net)ENDNOTE might be useful too, though they're not really designed for print use.
  • With Vista, Microsoft has introduced a new set of Core Fonts. To make them available on older versions of Windows, you need to install the PowerPoint viewer 2007. As described here,ENDNOTE the EULA explicitly forbids the use of the fonts on any other operating system.
  • Fry FontsENDNOTE offers some popular fonts like Apple Garamond or Coca Cola in TrueType format for free download.
  • If you can get hold of an older printer driver CD from c. 2000, you may find a collection of high quality Adobe Type 1 fonts, including "classics" like Garamond on it.
  • There are also some good (and some bad) OS2 fonts at http://hobbes.nmsu.edu.ENDNOTE
  • The Linux BoxENDNOTE offers an archive with 6,760 True Type fonts for free download. Beware of its size, though: it's huge (157.7 MB).
  • Another place worth looking at is the German TeX Users Group (TUG).ENDNOTE It provides some free high quality Type 1/TTF/Open Type fonts. Similarly, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN) offers a wide range of excellent fonts. Previews are available here.
  • For using Chinese fonts under Linux, Gentoo developer Alastair 'liquidx' Tse, has written a guide on Gentoo Linux Chinese Fonts HOWTO.ENDNOTE Worth it to check it out.
  • An affordable source for fonts is the German manufacturer of the multi-platform office suite Softmaker Office.ENDNOTE They offer one "font of the month" for free download. If TrueType fonts are sufficient for your work, you can buy a CD-ROMENDNOTE with 10 000 fonts. In case you need professional grade fonts, they are offering 6000 TrueType and Type 1 fonts.
  • Corel WordPerfect has the TTF fonts and CorelDraw has the TTF plus PS fonts. At least this is true for WP 8/9 and Draw 8/9. The fonts are in their own folders and can be copied WITHOUT installing the product anywhere. Despite rumours to the contrary, CorelDraw fonts are high quality Bitstream fonts which have been used by pre-press folks for years without incident.
  • FontshopENDNOTE is also a good place to go, but you might have a look at Linotype,ENDNOTE Lucasfonts,ENDNOTE and maybe FontfabrikENDNOTE (these are only retail) as well. They are all German companies offering some really nice fonts, that unfortunately aren't affordable for everybody, because they are quite expensive.
  • Adobe Systems does not have a long history of building fonts, but it was a pioneer in development of digital fonts, first with PostScript fonts, now with TrueType and OpenType faces. A number of fonts ship with Adobe products, and others may be purchased online. And if you have an ample budget, you can buy from Adobe its OpenType Font Folio: more than 2,200 fonts on a CD. Adobe also used to offer a “Type on Call” CD with its applications; you could install the font and buy an unlocking key. It has discontinued this, and if you have a Type on Call CD, you can throw it away.
  • Fonts.com is associated with Monotype Imaging, a long-time supplier of fonts from metal to digital.
  • Myfonts.com offers fonts from Bitstream, Linotype and URW, all well-established developers of quality fonts.


There are many other less well-known foundries; if you want to experiment, most offer fonts in the $20 range.

Personal tools