What are some less known or underused open source fonts?
Merriweather is great for longer texts. I use it in all book reader apps.
Anonymous Pro is my coding font of choice.
I second the Anonymous Pro!
I see lots of links here but no reasons why each is underused or anything.
Look, I’m a simple person, what I ask of a font is:
- differentiate your symbols — I’m talking 1, l, I, and i with more than a single pixel difference at 11pt 90DPI, and the 0 should be clearly less round than O
- be readable. No extra thinness, fancy swirls… look at any default font as an example (Arial or whatever), or most people’s custom web font as a counter-example
- proportionally spaced. I like \thinspace as thousand separator and I cannot lie
- indefinitely usable (for example as part of a game) after a single purchase that I can do as a consumer. Or free/donationware of course
A very tall order I know. So far I’ve reviewed a bunch of fonts (I wasn’t procrastinating why do you ask) and found PT Sans is the best option I’ve seen, so I’m using it, but I hate its Q. It’s basically an O with a tilde below it. Any better options if all you want is clarity and normalcy?
Edit: near the bottom of the replies there’s Hyperlegible. Somehow I had read over that. Seems to check the boxes! I’ll be looking at this closer on my computer later.
For those who love comic sans I might have bad news: you might be borderline dyslexic.
Switching to OpenDyslexic 3 helps
OpenDyslexic is less good for most dyslexics than you think. It’s based on some ideas of what might be useful rather than specific evidence. I recomend Sylexiad instead. Particularly Sylexiad Sans rather than Serif, but it’s all about finding what works best for you.
Here’s a nice list of open source Japanese monospace fonts:
https://github.com/tsunesan3/awsome-jp-coding-fonts
I’d say they’re likely pretty unknown because it took me around 30 minutes to find this list after searching for nice JP monospace fonts and not finding much.This is a new one: https://github.com/sayyadirfanali/Myna/
I don’t know it it’s underused, but my go to for years gas been League Spartan from The League of Moveable Type
It’s freeware not open source but I like Monofur. Might not be the most beautiful font but I find it very legible and the distinction between similar characters is quite good. It’s available in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories too.
Comic Neue
I really like Open Sans
What open source don’t should I use for high compatability and legibility?
This doesn’t add anything to the post, so, sorry, but this is a really good question! Thanks for contributing!
I love this hyperlegible one from the Braille Institute: https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
Ooh there’s a monospace version too
this is the way
It doesn’t take my duck.com alias
do any applications contain them by default? As much as I like the fonts my email is to much a price to pay given the fonts I use are fine.
You can get it from Google fonts which means you can easily download / import it into another application if that helps. One of the other replies also linked another source. I just provided the official link because they have a nice rationale on the design choices.
Came looking for this comment! It’s my favorite font of all time. So clean and legible.
Do I really need to give them an email to download? Why?
They’re part of my Linux distro’s repo. ttf-atkinson-hyperlegible and otf-atkinson-hyperlegible.
Windows mirror: https://font.download/font/atkinson-hyperlegible
You can just type any old bollocks in there and it reveals the download links.
IDK I’m not affiliated with them but maybe use a throwaway email alias.
I’m going to see if I can get this on my Kobo. Thank you for the link!
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I use this, it’s good.
I love this font I was going to say this too.
Shout out to 0xProto! Texture healing in a monospaced font is super cool!
and actually useful ligatures to boot! neat.
Rad!
Interesting! I hadn’t heard of this before, I’ll have to check it out.
