What are some less known or underused open source fonts?
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.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.
I love this hyperlegible one from the Braille Institute: https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
It doesn’t take my duck.com alias
Ooh there’s a monospace version too
this is the way
I’m going to see if I can get this on my Kobo. Thank you for the link!
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.
⠊⠝⠞⠑⠗⠑⠎⠞⠊⠝⠛
I love this font I was going to say this too.
I use this, it’s good.
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?
You can just type any old bollocks in there and it reveals the download links.
They’re part of my Linux distro’s repo. ttf-atkinson-hyperlegible and otf-atkinson-hyperlegible.
Windows mirror: https://font.download/font/atkinson-hyperlegible
IDK I’m not affiliated with them but maybe use a throwaway email alias.
Shout out to 0xProto! Texture healing in a monospaced font is super cool!
Interesting! I hadn’t heard of this before, I’ll have to check it out.
and actually useful ligatures to boot! neat.
Rad!
There are too many to mention since there’s so much out there.
You can go to a font website like dafont and perform a search for a font or browse different themes/styles and specify in the results that you want Public domain / GPL / OFL fonts.
Almost all of my fonts are released under an attribution license, so they’re free for commercial use and remixing.
Definitely a lot of fonts I’d very much like using whenever I need a new font next. Thanks!
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!
Agave. My favorite monospace/programming font. What I like best about it is how the baseline isn’t where the descenders begin. Makes it look unique in a nice way.
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.
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
M+ 1m has been my daily monospaced font ever since I found it, which is about eight years now. I don’t see it come up often when people talk about monospaced fonts.
