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As super users, using nicer fonts is often an important issue. Now that many sites are using @font-face to embed fonts in the page, having the same fonts installed locally means less downloading, and producing documents with custom fonts often look nicer. What are your favourite fonts?

Ideally fonts that have unicode support and that have proper ligatures and kerning.

Please add pictures if possible!

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does Consolas count? – RCIX Sep 12 '09 at 15:41
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Most fonts that come with a commercial OS have been licensed for inclusion in the OS and are not available for free. I don't think these fonts should be included in a list of the best free fonts. – jmohr Sep 12 '09 at 17:17
Do Minion Pro and Myriad Pro count (they come bundled for free with Acrobat Reader)? – Raphink Jun 26 '11 at 6:13
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closed as not constructive by Gareth, Daniel Beck, Nifle, music2myear, studiohack♦ Sep 30 '11 at 3:05

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8 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

The free fonts from the Exljbris foundry.

Notably:

Anivers

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Fontin Sans

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Museo

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All of these can be downloaded from MyFonts, and they all have free options. Definitely worth while getting! These are the fonts I've seen most commonly embedded with @font-face.

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That Fontin Sans is looking like a really nice font. Thanks! – joshhunt Sep 12 '09 at 7:19
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up vote 2 down vote

The DejaVu fonts:

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Standard on most Linux distros and freely downloadable for Windows, OS X, and other *nixes.

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up vote 2 down vote

Calibri:

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The thing that annoys me with Calibri is it's small size in comparison with other fonts. It makes it almost unusable on the web :( – Rich Bradshaw Sep 13 '09 at 18:50
Calibri can hardly be described as "free", not as in beer and certainly not as in speech. – spatz Jun 2 '10 at 22:39
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up vote 1 down vote

I'm partial to Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (specifically as my programming font).

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up vote 0 down vote

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Helvetica comes 'free' with OS X and is delicious.

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Though notably not Windows unfortunately. Helvetica Neue looks particularly delicious on screen. – Rich Bradshaw Sep 12 '09 at 7:19
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tr/most operating systems/OSX/. I cannot think of one other system that comes with this font 'free'. – MiffTheFox Sep 12 '09 at 7:49
URW++ created a free version of Helvetica that is distributed with Ghostscript, although I think for trademark reasons they call it something different. – Mark Ransom Sep 18 '09 at 21:04
There's a couple of lookalikes - Bitstream Vera Sans and DeJaVu Sans spring to mind as free alternatives. They don't have quite the same feel though. – Rich Bradshaw Oct 28 '09 at 9:58
Helvetica is nowhere close to a FREE font. – barraponto Mar 11 '10 at 13:15
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up vote 0 down vote

The Freefont family.

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They are free replacements for Helvetica, Times, Courier. Their Latin scripts are excellent; other scripts (e.g. Greek) need more work, especially in the kerning department, but they are a work in progress and everyone can (and does) help on occasion.

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