What Good Are Free Fonts?

How can you tell whether a free font is worth using? Judging a free font is just like judging any other font, except that price isn’t part of the equation.

There’s Free, And Then There’s Free

First of all, what does “free” actually mean when it comes to fonts? When I say “free fonts,” I mean digital fonts that have been made available by their developers free of charge, whether directly or bundled with software such as Microsoft Office or Adobe InDesign. I do not mean commercial fonts that you can find posted as free downloads from an unauthorized website without permission from the developers of the fonts. That is font piracy, plain and simple. “In fact, the first thing to think about, even with a supposedly ‘free’ font, is the end user license agreement, or EULA,” says Thomas Phinney, Vice President of FontLab, the company that makes font creation tools like Fontographer and FontLab Studio. “The ones that are bundled with your operating system or apps are only free in the sense that you didn’t pay for them separately. Their licenses generally allow most common uses, including commercial use. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you can stick them on a web server for your website.” Phinney points out that some free fonts, most commonly older ones, are either unclear about their license terms, or are only free for “personal use”—which may or may not be clearly defined. Newer free fonts often have an explicit open source or “libre” license that allows a very wide range of uses, generally much more than even most commercial fonts. “There are as many free fonts as there are commercial fonts,” says Jean François Porchez, well-known French type designer and former president of ATypI. “A font that’s

shipped with an operating system is seen by its users as free, since it’s available with the computer without any particular effort on the user’s part.” He cites the example of the Microsoft ClearType fonts Calibri, Corbel, etc., which are extremely well designed yet are “free” because they’re shipped with Windows and Microsoft Office (Figure 1). “Here, as in many other cases, when a company like Microsoft or Adobe (to take a couple of historical actors) decides to invest in the creation of high-quality typographic characters, the goal is to ship, with their tools, fonts that will be good ambassadors for the new technologies that they are putting in their users’ hands: OpenType functions, language support, good rendering onscreen, etc.”

As Porchez points out, it’s not a simple dichotomy of badly made free fonts versus high-quality fonts that you pay for. Nonetheless, he says, “in every case, quality has a price. When that price isn’t paid by the user, it’s because the producer has other reasons in mind when they make these digital fonts available. Maybe good ones, maybe bad ones, that’s for you to judge: to drive more traffic to a website, to make a related product or service better known, to control web traffic better by distributing fonts that will be installed on lots of servers throughout the world, and so forth.” It’s hard, says Porchez, “to define the criteria that make a family of characters of satisfactory quality. One part is subjective, another may be more pragmatic, and the boundary between these two aspects isn’t clear.” Phinney is a bit harder on free fonts. “Of course, there are cruddy fonts out there that people charge money for, and ones that are free. It’s just that the odds are very different with free fonts than with commercial ones. That said, there is a small minority of free fonts that are of stellar quality, and that percentage is steadily going up.”

Evaluating the Font

So how do you figure out whether a free font is any good or not? There are a few basic questions to ask before you pick a font or font family. First, is it suitable for your purpose, whatever that may be? Does it have the character set your project needs (Figure 2)? Is it readable? Assuming you’re planning on using it for text, is it comfortably readable in large blocks, in the format it will ultimately be read in? For example, if you’re designing a printed newsletter, how does this font look printed on paper? If you’re designing a website, how does it look onscreen? And you have to think about not just how it looks at first glance, but how it looks and feels when you’re trying to read quite a lot of text set in it (Figure 3).

Second, what format is the font file in? You probably want an OpenType font, which works across platforms, is Unicode-based, and is easier and more flexible to work with than the older font formats TrueType and PostScript Type 1. There are two kinds of OpenType font; they work equally well, but under the hood they have somewhat different mechanisms. They’re often described as two “flavors” of OT font. The most obvious difference is in their names: PostScript-flavor OT fonts have a .otf extension, which is instantly recognizable as “OpenType font,” but TrueType-flavor OT fonts use the same .ttf extension that older TrueType fonts have always used. So the extension by itself doesn’t always tell you what kind of font it is. This shouldn’t make any practical difference to most users, but it’s useful to know. Third, is the font well made? This isn’t just a judgment on the style of the letters; it’s a matter of how well constructed the digital outlines are, how well the characters fit together, and whether the font has been thoroughly tested to be sure it works in all normal circumstances (Figure 4).

Look at the Details

Jean François Porchez suggests a number of factors to look for in evaluating a font.

The quality of the outlines. “It’s best to find a PDF and zoom in on certain details, looking at the smoothness of the curves, the intersections of details, the coherence of the thicks and thins, serifs, alignments.”

The quality of the spacing. “Harder to be certain, since the spacing of the sample phrases composed by a designer is not necessarily what’s really in the font. But it’s possible to compare typical words, phrases, and pairs of letters: ooononnn, OOOHOHHH, VAT, n-no-o, L’A, n’s …”—common particular combinations that type designers use to help assess spacing (Figure 5).

The quality of screen display at different sizes. “If the sizes of letters appear inconsistent with the body size, it’s because the basics of hinting have not been implemented.”

The character set. “Are all the 26 letters, numbers, punctuation marks present? Accented letters? All the elements that you use on a daily basis?” Thomas Phinney went into many of the details of well-made fonts in a recent column in Communication Arts, entitled “Know if a Font Sucks.” In addition to consistency of letter-fit and kerning, he talked about the importance of subtle design features like “overshoot,” where the curve of a round character like an “O” needs to extend slightly below the baseline (and above the x-height or cap height) in order to appear evenly aligned. (A quick way to see this is to look at these letters together: HOE.) (Figure 6) Phinney goes into quite a lot of specific detail about how a digital font is constructed, from the placement of the digital “points” that define the shape of a curve to the care with which a type designer crafts the transitions from round to straight strokes within the shape of a letter.

These details add up to two kinds of things to watch out for: how well designed the letters are (do they look right) and how well constructed they are (are the digital outlines well made, so they’ll behave right when the font is rendered on a screen or when printed). Even the worst of fonts can serve an educational purpose. Laura Worthington, a type designer who is well known for her popular calligraphic fonts, has used free fonts in an unusual way when she was teaching typography and type design. She asked her students to take a poor-quality free font and try to improve it. They import the character shapes into Adobe Illustrator, where they can look at the digital outlines and see the points that define the extremes and the curves, then manipulate those points to change the outlines. She says that it’s immediately obvious to her students how badly some fonts are made. Fonts that were created by simply auto-tracing the shapes of a printed specimen, for example, often end up with lots of extraneous points in places where they make no sense; those poorly defined points can make the characters render badly or inconsistently rather than smoothly and correctly, especially onscreen (Figures 7 and 8). Phinney points out that only PostScript fonts, or OpenType fonts with PostScript outlines, will import seamlessly into Illustrator; if the font has TrueType outlines, Illustrator will convert those to PostScript first, which has an effect on how the points define the curves. You can see this same effect if you convert type to outlines in InDesign. A font with PostScript outlines will yield paths with far fewer points than a font with TrueType outlines (Figure 9). A font-editing program like Fontographer, FontForge, Glyphs, or FontLab Studio will give you a better way to dive into the heart of a digital font. But you don’t need to buy a font-production tool just to evaluate the font’s construction. Most of these applications offer free trial versions, which will let you open up the font file and take a look at exactly how the font is made, although it may not let you make any changes and save them.

Feel the Material

“In the past 20 years,” says Jean François Porchez, “the difference between a high-quality character and a low-quality one has evolved. Once upon a time, the difference was clear. But since then, we’ve had numerous characters, both free and commercial, that are of average if not mediocre quality but that are well enough made to charm you and make you download them or buy them. It’s only when you use them that you find out about the constant problems I’ve been talking about… and by then it’s too late. “The best parallel may be fabrics, since in fashion, ever since H&M, Zara, Gap, and the rest, nothing is expensive and everything is right there, easily accessible to anyone. But rarely is the quality there. The font market suffers the same phenomenon: lots of fonts are available, it’s magic, immediate, either free or not very expensive. But very few of them are of excellent quality. It’s up to the users to learn how to tell the difference.” There might be one surprising advantage to the explosion of free fonts. Porchez maintains that the existence of high-quality free fonts has lessened the incentive for using pirated fonts. “The advantage of free,” he says, “is that they make it easier to respect the rights of designers, to reduce piracy, and to learn how to search.” Porchez heads up the master’s program in typographic design at ECV Paris, where, he says, “We have put in place a total interdiction of pirated letterforms. Our students don’t get a grade if we have any doubt about the provenance of their characters. The result is astonishing: they search more, they discover new things, they become curious, they get better, because they stop simply copying characters from the next table.”