Free Fonts for Publishing

Allow me to make clear before proceeding that I intend to discuss typefaces for the interior text of books. Display fonts for covers are another subject. One can get away with type there that would be entirely unsuitable for text.

So—free. You may have been warned about low quality ‘junk’ fonts. This is not as much the problem as it was in the early days of desktop publishing. There are many quite good and quite free typefaces out there. We use some ourselves at Arachis Press. Let me begin with a familiar name: Adobe.

Back in the early days of personal computers Adobe developed a rather nice typeface named Utopia. This is a slightly simplified (for the low resolution printers of the time) take on something similar to Baskerville. Utopia was intended as a sort of Times New Roman killer, a font suitable to all-around office use. It didn’t displace TNR but it proved to be a quite nice font that eventually was made free. One may see quality novels and nonfiction from the big publishing houses printed in Utopia. Though they undoubtedly use the paid version, the free font is completely acceptable.

More recently, Adobe released their free Source Serif. This typeface has roots in the 18^th Century Fournier designs and looks quite professional on the page. Not as ‘formal’ as Utopia—use whichever suits the mood of your book. One could probably get by with just those two fonts. There is also a free Source Sans; less useful as text but one could employ it effectively for chapter titles and such.

Which brings us to Charter. This is also an older design from Matthew Carter and created for much the same purposes as Utopia. Moreover, it is based on the same original typeface as Source Serif; there are differences, to be sure, but they are very similar. Which one is preferable is entirely a matter of personal taste. Charter also has a free version (more than one, actually). When I say free, I mean completely so: no cost and free to use however one wishes.

I could mention the widely available Deja Vu (aka Vera) fonts here also. They too were crafted in the early days of computers for much the same reasons as Utopia and Charter. Honestly, I do not think highly of the way they look on a printed page. Not that there is anything wrong with them; they are simply not very attractive to my eye.

There are loads of other acceptable free typefaces out there and I am not going to list them. There is all the stuff from Google Fonts, of course. Some are adequate, but be warned many are better suited to screens than printed pages. Some are not the latest and best versions, also—Crimson, which can be a pretty decent text typeface, is best downloaded from its designer, not Google. Be warned too that some of these typefaces can become problematic when sent off to a printer, with characters not printing properly and so on. Still many free fonts one may find are well designed and look good; just be sure to give any print proofs a very thorough going over!

I must mention the URW++ free package. These were the fonts donated to the Ghostscript project way back and include quite usable and professional typefaces. In particular, the Garamond No.8 and Palladio, which are our ‘default’ choices for, respectively, novels and poetry. Palladio is a variant on Palatino, and designed for URW by Zapf himself. Garamond No.8 is essentially Stempel Garamond. There are several other good fonts included. One can find the packet for download online. They may be ‘old’ designs but they hold up.

Now we at AP do not use just free fonts. We have a license for a package of Bitstream typefaces and those are every bit as likely to show up. But we could get by on free, if need be, and so could anyone else out there wishing to publish on their own. I would suggest starting with time-tested fonts like Charter and Utopia, and the URW++ package, and taking it from there.