> > http://www.alvit.de/blog/article/20-best-license-free-official-fonts A few
Nice collection. There seem to be some good-quality ones there too, but for most it's impossbile to say from the screen shots. Gentium (still under development) and Vera count as high quality, for example. Shame though they only come as this truetype nonsense. In general, truth is most free fonts are of such shocking quality, even their 10kb is a waste of space on a 200GB disk. You expect the letters of a word to be visually equally spaced (kerned), and it's a serious amount of work to make that happen, especially when you start scaling the font to different sizes. What works for one language doesn't for another (different letter pairs - gotcha!). Then there's the question of how many ligatures, punctuation symbols and accented characters are in the font, and how many bugs (yes you wouldn't believe it). There's a reason a font family (minimum: roman, italic, bold, bold italic = 4 fonts) sells for several hundred and up. Look up quality foundries like Agfa, Linotype, Bitstream, Monotype, ITC, URW, Adobe, Microsoft. And then none of these have any latex support (not even Gentium or Vera). > Another free ( as in beer ) font site is http://www.freefont.de/us/index.htm > > It's a loss leader opertion to try to get you to buy a huge archive of fonts > out of which they offer one free per month. That said I have had some nice > looking fonts from there. Not sure about Softmaker. Fact is they make a lot of rubbish. They used to have a 5000 fonts CD with postscript and truetype fonts for about $100 (the equivalent from the above foundries costs at least 2 zeros more). One of the key people who make latex support for fonts said the collection was so bad he gave up because it wasn't worth his time. These latex people know what they're talking about when it comes to fonts. Now the same CD is available with truetype only for about the same price, or complete for 350EUR = $700. Nobody has risked that money to find out whether the quality has improved (slim chance). There is a fontsite500 CD with 500 fonts from fontsite.com for very little money, for which full latex support exists. Most of the fonts seem to be licensed from Softmaker. I bought it, and it didn't take me long to find some fonts that were definitely not worth more than I paid for. It is however a large enough collection for quite some situations, and many fonts would be of good enough quality, albeit not top-notch. I would definitely recommend looking at it. US$40 is peanuts for that. I've spent some time investigating font options, and the air is either very thin, very expensive, or downright smelly. You can't even have two. If there's some good-quality stuff going cheap or free, the latex people want to know about it. You can get it from CTAN then. HTH, Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
