Where can I get good fonts?

Where can I get good fonts?

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. See Web Links on www.scribus.net for those and several other sources of fonts and font information.

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. (TypeOasis, the site that hosts the Fonteria, has nice work by other designers, too.) 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.'" Some free TrueType fonts can also be downloaded from schriftgrad which als hosts a good glossary on typography/printing/DTP in German. http://fonts.goldenweb.it/index_file/l/en is a directory with 20 590 free TrueType fonts of mixed quality, and http://www.webpagepublicity.com/free-fonts-g.html contains 6500 TTF fonts, also free as in beer. Please check any of those fonts for licensing issues, since there may be restrictions such as only for non-commercial use.

The MS Core TrueType fonts (Sourceforge.net) might be useful too, though as far as I know they're not really designed for print use.

Corel WP has the TTF fonts and Corel Draw 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.

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. I recently discovered this, when I was given an old Lexmark LaserPrinter as a "present". While the printer itself wasn't too interesting (it prints OK, but that's it), the driver CD-ROM contained this treasure. Buying an old printer on e-bay, even if you don't intend to use it, can save you a lot of money with respect to high quality and industry standard fonts, provided you also receive the driver CD-ROM! --C schaefer 00:37, 20 December 2005 (CET)

Another affordable source for fonts is the German manufacturer of the multi-platform office suite Softmaker Office. They offer one "font of the month" for free download. If TrueType fonts are sufficient for your work, you can buy a CD-ROM with 10 000 fonts for (at the moment) 59,95 EUR. In case you need professional grade fonts, they are offering 6000 TrueType and Type 1 fonts for 429 EUR (which isn't much).

Adobe Illustrator has fonts (Adobe garamond etc.), also Adobe Type Manager (full product) has fonts but it is not strictly needed with XP since Win2K and XP render Type 1 fonts natively. ATM is useful for font management.

There is also some good (and some bad) OS2 fonts at http://hobbes.nmsu.edu.

The Linux Box offers an archive with 6,760 True Type fonts for free download. Beware of its size, though: it is HUGE (157.7 MB).

Another place worth looking at is the German TeX Users Group (TUG). It provides some free high quality Type 1/TTF/Open Type fonts.

For using Chinese fonts under Linux, Gentoo developer Alastair 'liquidx' Tse, has written a guide on Gentoo Linux Chinese Fonts HOWTO. Worth check it out.

So http://fontshop.de is a good place to go, but you might also have a look at http://linotype.com, http://lucasfonts.com and maybe http://fontfabrik.com (they only retail). They are all German companies offering some really nice fonts, that unfortunately aren't affordable for everybody, because they are quite expensive.

An interesting article on publish.com not only provides a little bit of history of professional font manufacturing, but also many links to commercial vendors. It might be worth checking their products.

See Also

• Right font for right purpose
• Scribus Links: Download resource section
• Optimal Use of Fonts on Linux from The Linux Documentation Project
• Unicode Font Guide For Free/Libre Open Source Operating Systems
  • Excellent guide to the latest news and release of Unicode Font for open source OS such as Linux and BSD