Free Fonts
Fonts for your documents, website, pictures, software
Free Fonts
This page lists sources of free fonts that you can use in your documents and pictures. Some of the websites here are repositories for a whole bunch of free fonts while others may only offer a single font for free. Since there appears to be many "free fonts" sites on the Internet, not all of which are genuine, and some of which may even be scams, I have tried to verify that all the sites listed here are the real thing. However, you should take your own precautions as well, and check each site out carefully. Another thing to note is that even though the font may be offered for free, they may have licensing restrictions attached to their use and distribution in the End User Licence Agreement (EULA), so make sure you read their licence terms before you use them.
If you are looking for monospace (fixed-width fonts), such as for a programmer's editor or an HTML editor, please see the Free Programmer's Fonts page instead. Font-making software are also listed separately on their own page: Free Font Editors and Free Online Font Creation Sites.
Finally, if you are looking for a font for your website, you may be interested in How to Use Web Fonts: CSS Tutorial. I also have a separate tutorial for those who use the BlueGriffon web editor: How to Use Google Fonts and Other Web Fonts in BlueGriffon.
Terminology
In case, you get lost in the terminology used below, I sometimes use faces and typefaces to refer to the name of a font family or some set of fonts. For example, Arial and Helvetica are typefaces. While I use "font" on this page interchangeably with "typeface", this is technically not correct, since the word "font" refers to more than just the typeface: it includes the size, spacing and pitch of the particular typeface.
Serif fonts are the fonts where each character has extra short lines at the end of each stroke. For example, both the Times Roman font and the Times New Roman font are serif fonts. Sans-serif faces are those fonts that do not have the extra lines at the end of each stroke. Examples of sans-serif fonts include Helvetica and Arial. The text you're looking at on thefreecountry.com is in a sans serif font.
Related Pages
- How to Create / Make Your Own Website: The Beginner's A-Z Guide
- Free Drawing and Painting Software, Image and Photo Editing Programs
- Free Word Processors and Office Suites
- Free Programmer's Editors, Integrated Development Environment (IDE), ASCII Text Editors
- Free HTML Editors and WYSIWYG Web Editors
- Free DVD Authoring and Creation Software
- Free Data Recovery, File and Partition Recovery, Undelete and Unformat Software
- Which Font Should I Use for My Web Page? Tips on Choosing Fonts for Your Website
- Tips on Choosing a Good Domain Name
Free Fonts
- Downloadable Google Fonts
These are the downloadable versions of the fonts that are available from Google Fonts. The link to the master zip file containing all the fonts can be found on the page itself. Most of the fonts are apparently licensed under the SIL Open Font License, while others use the Apache 2 licence and Ubuntu Font License.
- FontSquirrel
This site provides a large number fonts that are supposed to be free even for commercial work. (As always, read the licence agreements for each font before using them, just in case.) Types of fonts available include serif, sans serif, script, monospaced, dingbat, calligraphic, stencil, blackletter, typewriter, programming, handdrawn, slab serif, and so on.
- Adobe's Source Sans Pro
Source Sans Pro is an open source font from Adobe, released under the Open Font License. This is a sans-serif font that you can not only download and use, but that has its source code made available so that you can modify it. The designers sought to create a font that was legible for use in program user interfaces as well as comfortable to read in text passages. The link above takes you to the Adobe blog post announcing its release, but the fonts themselves need to be obtained from its download page.
- Ubuntu Font Family
The Ubuntu Font Family is a professionally-designed family of fonts originally created to be used in the Ubuntu distribution of the Linux operating system. At the time this description was written, it contains fonts in sans-serif style, with a variety of weights (regular, bold, italic, bold italic, etc). The plan is to eventually include monospaced fonts and condensed fonts as well.
- STIX Fonts
The STIX Fonts are open source, royalty free fonts (under the SIL Open Font License) intended for use in scientific, engineering and mathematical documents which sometimes use symbols not found in the standard fonts you find your system. The fonts are fully hinted (which means they are supposed to look good even when used at small point sizes) with a huge range of glyphs (loosely speaking, "characters"), and come in the form of OpenType (PostScript) fonts.
- SIL Fonts
SIL, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, provides a number of Unicode encoded and legacy fonts for downloading from their site. The fonts vary from those supporting the Latin character set (which is used for English and such languages) to those supporting other languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, etc). Interesting ones to look for (in my opinion; your tastes will obviously be different) include Gentium, a multilingual serif font, and Doulos SIL, a font that includes the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).
- DaFont
This site provides a variety of free True Type and OpenType fonts, including fancy fonts, techno fonts, dingbats, etc. There are also bitmapped fonts available. The fonts are organised according to category, which makes the site easy to use, since if you are looking for, say, cartoon fonts, you can simply go to the cartoon section. You can see a sample of the appearance of the font. Note that not all the links to the fonts work.
- 1001 Free Fonts
This free fonts site provides a wide variety of True Type and Open Type fonts. They are free only for personal use. The fonts are organised alphabetically according to the font name. Sample text using the font is given.
- Microsoft Core Fonts
Some time ago, Microsoft distributed a free set of "core fonts" including Arial, Comic Sans, Impact, Times New Roman, Verdana, Webdings and Trebuchet so that web designers could create pages that appear the same way regardless of the operating system they used. If you use Windows, you already have these fonts, or updated versions of them. This site includes the same free fonts in an RPM package for use on Linux systems that support it. (It is supposedly packaged in a way that does not violate the Microsoft free distribution license.)
Free Programmer's Fonts: Monospace Fonts for Programmers, Webmasters, Designers
The monospace or programmers' fonts previously listed here have been moved to their own page. Please see the Free Programmer's Fonts page for the list of fonts previously mentioned here.
Related Pages
- Free Audio CD Rippers
- How to Register Your Own Domain Name - get your own domain
- Important Precautions to Take When Buying a Domain Name
- Free Antivirus Software and Free Online Virus Scans
- Free Partitioning Software - Copy, Create, Move, Resize, Convert, Undelete Partitions
- Free Hard Disk Backup and Restore, Hard Disk Image and Cloning Utilities
- Free CD and DVD Burners and Copying Software
- Free Screen Video Recorders, Game Recorders and Screen Capture Software
Newest Pages
- How to Set the Height of a DIV Relative to a Browser Window (CSS)
- Free EPUB Readers (Ebook Viewing Software)
- How to Generate the Free Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate on Your Own (Windows) Computer
- How to Insert Meta Tags into a Web Page with BlueGriffon
- How to Play a Song (or Some Other Audio Clip) from a List on a Website
- Two Ways to View a Binary File on Windows Without Installing Anything
- How to Draw a Horizontal Line on a Web Page with Expression Web
- How to Create a Website Free of Charge
- Why Can't I Make Up Any Domain I Want? Is There a Way to Do Away with a Registrar Altogether?
- What's the Difference Between a Domain Name Registrar and a Web Host?
Popular Pages
- How to Create/Make Your Own Website: The Beginner's A-Z Guide
- How to Register Your Own Domain Name - how to get your own domain name
- What's the Difference Between a Content Management System (CMS), a Blog, a Web Editor and an Online Site Builder?
- Expression Web Tutorial: How to Design a Website with Microsoft Expression Web
- Dreamweaver Tutorial: How to Design a Website with Dreamweaver CS6
- How to Make a Mobile-Friendly Website: Responsive Design in CSS
- BlueGriffon Tutorial: How to Design a Website with BlueGriffon 3
- How to Create a Blog
- Free CD and DVD Burners and Copying Software
- Free Hard Disk Backup and Restore, Hard Disk Image and Cloning Utilities
How to Link to This Page
It will appear on your page as:
