Crimson Text, from Toronto-based designer Sebastian Koch who says “Crimson Text is a font family for book production in the tradition of beautiful oldstyle typefaces.  There are a lot of great free fonts around, but one kind is missing: those Garamond-inspired types with all the little niceties like oldstyle figures, small caps, fleurons, math characters and the like. In fact, a lot of time is spend developing free knock-offs of ugly “standards” like Times and Helvetica. Crimson Text is inspired by the fantastic work of people like Jan Tschichold, Robert Slimbach and Jonathan Hoefler. I hope that the free type community will one day be able to enjoy Crimson Text as a beautiful workhorse.”  Definitely a nice face worth checking out, even though it is still in its early stages. Download the Crimson Text TTF.

Surface is from Bruno Herfst at Sauce Design in the Netherlands, a very nice medium weight humanist sans-serif font. Falls somewhere between text and display, very friendly. not too hard – not too soft, just right. Lots of foreign characters and such. Download Surface Medium OTF file.

Hattori Hanzo, a Creative Commons typeface from Moscow Based Roman Shamin is a font that was created for catchy headings and short blocks of text and body copy. It’s nice, clean and legible with lots of international-ability. Download Hattori-Hanzo OTF!

Cardo from Fonts for Scholars in Rye, New York is a large Unicode font specifically designed for the needs of classicists, Biblical scholars, medievalists, and linguists.  Since it may be used to prepare materials for publication, it also contains features that are required for high-quality typography, such as ligatures, text figures (also known as old style numerals), true small capitals and a variety of punctuation and space characters.  It may also be used to document and discuss the features of Unicode that are applicable to the these disciplines, as we work to help colleagues understand the value (and limitations) of Unicode.

This font is my version of a typeface cut for the Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius and first used to print Pietro Bembo’s book De Aetna.  This font has been revived in modern times under several names (Bembo, Aetna, Aldine 401).  I chose it mainly because it is a classic book face, suitable for scholarship, and also because it is easier to get various diacritics sized and positioned for legibility with this design than with some others.  I added a set of Greek characters designed to harmonize well on the page with the Roman letters as well as many other characters useful to scholars.  The Hebrew characters are designed to match those used in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia as closely as possible and so have no claim to originality.  Download Cardo 99 TTF.

OK, again I am hooked on these open source typefaces – they have been of great quality and consistency and of course, they are free to use, share, modfy, etc. Linux Libertine, from the .org of the same name is one such beautiful face – “Letters and fonts have two characteristics: On the one hand they are basic elements of communication and fundamental to our culture, on the other hand they are cultural goods and an artistic work. You are able to see just the first aspect, but when it comes to software you’ll see copyrights and patents even on the most elementary fonts. Therefore we want to give you a free alternative: This is why we founded the Libertine Open Fonts Project.” (also of note, Libertine is the face used on the Wikipedia logo). The package includes a very diverse 20 variants, including Regular, Italic, Bold Italic, Small Capitals, Biolinum (an organic sans-serif and could be also described as organogrotesque) and a few “keyboard” versions ideal for computer documentation. Download massive Linux Libertine package here.

Gentium from SIL is a typeface family designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin and Greek scripts to produce readable, high-quality publications. It supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode. The design is intended to be highly readable, reasonably compact, and visually attractive. The additional ‘extended’ Latin letters are designed to naturally harmonize with the traditional 26 ones. Diacritics are treated with careful thought and attention to their use. Gentium also supports both polytonic and monotonic Greek, including a number of alternate forms.  Download Gentium Truetype font.

Lentil, from Grand Rapids, Michigan based Dan Meyer at Fictional Head Design is a great serif face with more flair than your average times new roman, without being too over the top and unusable. Download Lentil TTF.