Font Resources

[Spinland]

(I was going to post this in the Xtreme forum but then decided it was kind of meta.)

I'm assuming everyone is familiar with dafont.com, but have you seen this site?

www.1001fonts.com

This is where I go if I've encountered a weird font and am trying to research what it is. Their interface is (at least to me) really easy to work with, and you can type sample text and see it appear in any of their font displays. So far as I know everything is free (some fonts have a "no commercial use" clause but I think you can usually negotiate a commercial fee).

I stumbled across it when my golf league partner (who's a drummer) was trying to figure out how to re-create a logo made for one of his bands so they could get a vector version for large-scale printing. I was just going to vectorize it for him, but it was clearly just a fancy font so I decided first to try to hunt it down. This place was where I scored.

[Gare]

Good tip, Spinland.

Folks, always exercise a little caution when Site X or site Y advertises a billion free emoticons, fonts, textures, whatever. Just like Face Book free downloads, "Font Bonanza" sites can whack your system with malware. 1,0001 Fonts is cool, Acid Fonts is not so cool—downloaded a free virus a few years back.

If you have a bitmap sample of a typeface, What The Font not only has a very good reading engine that usually gicves ou more options than you'd imagine, but there's also an active forum composed of fontaholics who usually can identify a typeface and lead you to in within 24 hours.

[Gare]

NextraPixel has listed some nice symbol fonts:

Free Symbol typefaces

Um, you might not need to download the very last one: GeoType and the three others are mine, and Xara includes them on the installation CD.

My Best,

Gary

[Gare]

This one is for the Upper Crust of Fontaholics:

Noupe has assembled a very nice compendium of free and commercial script typefaces.

Download totally free use (and some commercial restricted) script fonts!

Nick Curtis shows up here with "Creampuff" and there are some knock-offs of "Candy", "Vivaldi", and other commercial ones.

My Best,
"Hi. My name is Gary, and I've been without a script font for three months."
("Hi, Gary!")

[Welles]

I just ran into this one today...

The League of Moveable Type

[Gare]

Thanks for the link, Welles!

I downloaded the two Goudy sets and I have to say that they are well crafted.

As in "professionally done".

Interesting initiative. A cooperative effort that all can share in, both the work and the results...stands the potential of an alternative to freeware, which is pot luck as far as quality has mostly gone.



-g-

[Gare]

It's not often you can not only get a glimpse of a craft done superbly, but also to be able to share in the craftsmanship for free.

There is a collection of Revivalist fonts, the Fell Types are meticulously reconstructed from imprints circa 1950; before you start downloading the entire collection, take a moment to read the litany about the hows, whys, and just the excellence of this work.

The Fell Types Revivalist Collection

Find some words as elegant as the typefaces, and you're all set to type!

FellType.jpg

[Gare]

If you're into speed-shopping, ignore this link. But if you need an expertly crafted, unusual typeface for your website or a document you want to print:

Typefaces for the Web

My fave is "Pyke's Peak". This is not the commercial version...it's called Pyke's Peak Zero, but it's fun and nostalgic even without the additional 200-300 glyphs.

[Gare]

The 35 base fonts have been "Gyrized" by an independent group of typographers to update and extend them. The goal was to extend the glyph set and provide TeX support (pun intended). LaTeX is a comparatively ancient publishing system still used by Academics today, tag-based, predates SGML (which was the father of HTML).

The importance of getting this set (Palantino, Times, Century Schoolbook, Avant Garde), isn't just to fill up your new hard drive. URW, one of Europe's oldest and most prestigious foundries has donated the digital glyphs for use in this project. When I have a DTP gig and I need the best typeface I can buy, I shop for URW fonts. In fact, a lot of the glyph designs they sell to Adobe and Linotype come in a URW brand, usually with alternative font names.

expertly recast original GhostScript Fonts

[Spinland]

Sweet, thanks for all these goodies.

Just FYI I had to write my master's thesis in LaTeX. That was interesting. I bought my first copy of Paint Shop Pro (v4) mainly because it was priced for students and could save images as EPS for the thesis work.

[Gare]

Fortunately for the three people who still practice Desktop Publishing, there's no longer that immutable bind between your document and a print driver!

I remember using Aldus PageMaker 4.01 or something, and if you didn't have a printer profile defined that matched your document settings, EPS files wouldn't preview, fonts displayed wrong, in general Windows wasn't a GUI!

Fortunately, that jazz is mostly a moot point, you can preview EPS files in a number of programs, and I think Acrobat contributed to the break between a document and what's going to print the document.

The version of Palatino they offer is quite nice as an OTF, BTW.

Gare