Finding and using free fonts

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.

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.

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.

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.