elementary OS

Include Stylish Fonts

Registered by Danielle Foré on 2012-11-30

One thing that's super handy in Mac OS is the collection of really great stylish fonts that are included for use in iLife and iWork. I think we can learn from them here and include our own set of really great free fonts to promote great content production in elementary.

List of Currently Included Fonts:

Bitstream Charter
Century Schoolbook
Courier
DejaVu Sans
Dingbats
Droid (Sans & Serif)
Free (Mono, Sans, & Serif)
Liberation (Mono, Sans, & Serif)
Monospace
NanumGothic
NanumMyeongjo
Nimbus (Mono, Roman, & Sans)
Open Sans
Raleway
Sans
Serif
Standard Symbols
unifont
URW Bookman
URW Chancery
URW Gothic
URW Palladio

Types of Fonts We're Missing:

Handwriting (Print, Script, Calligraphy)
Texture (Sketch, Chalk, Other)
Pop Culture (Western, 80's, etc)

Read the full specification

Blueprint information

Status:: Not started

Approver:: None

Priority:: Undefined

Drafter:: None

Direction:: Needs approval

Assignee:: None

Definition:: New

Series goal:: None

Implementation:: Unknown

Milestone target:: None

Related branches

Related bugs

Sprints

Whiteboard

Do you already ship Open Sans?
--anon

Yes. I could help to look at other options - ideally there should be a few fonts for a range of tasks/ideas. And they really ought to be good - no shitty kerning or non-embeddable fonts. --ottorobba

What about this selection? http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/11/08/40-excellent-freefonts-for-professional-design/
-Chris

Does it go in here? http://www.infinality.net/blog/
--anon

Not sure about infinality but that smashing magazine list has some pretty good ones (exljbris makes really good fonts) - we should be careful as to not include everything under the sun but rather a few good fonts for different uses and different styles. Another place to take a look is http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/catalogue which is a curated list of open-source only fonts. Adobe has also released Source Sans, which is their first open source attempt at typography and it is a pretty good sans serif in the humanist veins of helvetica (http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/08/source-sans-pro.html).
I'll see about starting a google docs spec sheet.
--ottorobba

What about removing some of the current fonts that serve more as a duplicate such as DejaVu, Free, or Liberation Sans if possible? I remember last time I used LibreOffice in Ubuntu the most annoying thing was the bloat of ok meh level fonts.
-Linus Bobcat

Yup, I'm down for removing a few fonts. We really don't need 100 different legible sans-serif fonts --DanRabbit

My list of recommendations follows below - I know that it cover more than what is actually missing but there were no geometric fonts in the original list save for URW Gothic L.

I did cover a few more areas but tried to stay within a few fonts for each. The list by itself should suffice but of course, feel free to pick and choose from this. I checked every font for a few things, like kerning, shape consistency and whatnot but it wouldn't hurt to have another pair of eyes look at them. All of these are free for commercial use and quite a few are open source.

*Serif
Droid Serif - http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Droid-Serif
Lindel Hill - http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/linden-hill
Sorts Mill Goudy - http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Sorts-Mill-Goudy