Printing, typesetting and fonts

Day 5,555, 09:59 • Published in Austria Austria • by Ginet

Having found myself in charge of a newspaper, I thought it was time to talk about typography.

You might be wondering: is Ginet crazy? This is an eNewspaper, not a printed one! We can't even choose our own fonts here.

You are correct. About the newspaper, fonts, and even maybe about Ginet being crazy. But actually, fonts ARE important, and they do impact YOU personally. If you use a computer or laptop, then you have the ability to use fonts in other software you normally use every day such as word processing, even if you can't change fonts in eRepublik. Maybe you have not yet changed your system font and wish to do so. Or maybe you wish to type words or letters on top of an image in your graphics software, but you want some more exciting fonts.

So the purpose of this article is to showcase some favorite fonts that you can use from FontLibrary.org. All are free, and the ones showcased here are licensed under the permissive OFL (SIL Open Font License), meaning you can use it in any projects whether personal or commercial.

One of the fonts I'll talk about at the end of the article even changes a little bit for different iterations of the same letter, which is unusual and interesting!

All of the fonts I talk about here are available on FontLibrary.org (just search in the search box on the FontLibrary site for the font you want). I won't put a link in every time for each font because I'm concerned that the eRepublik rules of journalism don't want us to put in too many links outside the game. I thought it would still be OK to mention the site and link to it once though, because FontLibrary is not a commercial or promotional site, and because fonts and typesetting are a part of journalism in general.

Favorite general-purpose reading fonts

My favorite all-purpose font that's easy to read is Boon Regular, also known as Boon v1.1 It is easy on the eyes and has a "friendly" look while still appearing professional. Here is a sample. The film effect is just a border I added to make it clear where the image begins and ends.


Boon has language support for characters in Afrikaans, Baltic, Basic Latin, Catalan, Central European, Esperanto, Euro, Igbo Onwu, Lao, Pinyin, Romanian, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, Western European.

Although the Boon font above is ideal for most reading purposes, any sans-serif font has one major weakness, which is that the lowercase "L" and uppercase "i" look similar (which to be fair, Boon has tried to avoid with a tiny swish at the bottom of their lowercase L).

In most sans-serif fonts though, this L/i confusion can lead to all sorts of problems in situations where spelling is mission-critical, such as domain name purchases and so on. It continues to surprise me how many of the big-name marketplaces in that field insist on using sans-serif fonts for domain name sales and auctions.

So my favorite serif font for general purpose is New Telegraph. It looks nicely modern, thanks to the even thickness of all the lines, yet you can clearly distinguish the letters from each other. Here is a sample of New Telegraph:

New Telegraph has language support for characters in Afrikaans, Baltic, Basic Latin, Catalan, Central European, Dutch, Esperanto, Euro, Turkish, Western European.

Favorite monospace font

Monospace doesn't need to look boring or awkward any more. Take a look at CMU Typewriter, nice and modern. (My newspaper's logo image has the letter G written on it in CMU Typewriter). Here is a sample of CMU typewriter. I'd recommend it as a display or header font rather than a reading font, so the sample you see below is written in headline style:



CMU Typewriter supports alphabets from the following languages: Basic Cyrillic, Basic Greek, Basic Latin, Central European, Dutch, Esperanto, Euro, Igbo Onwu, Latin Ligatures, Romanian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Western European

Favorite headline font

I recommend Cantora One for display headlines. It stands out, looks modern and is suitable for a variety of headline purposes:



Cantora One supports the character sets: Afrikaans, Baltic, Basic Latin, Catalan, Central European, Dutch, Esperanto, Euro, Igbo Onwu, Romanian, Turkish, Western European

Favorite handwriting font

While I enjoy handwriting fonts in theory, I'd be the first to admit that they're not the most practical or readable. I very rarely use handwriting fonts. That said, if you do any design work where you occasionally need to incorporate words or letters in a handwriting font, it's good to have something already installed on your computer to see how it could look. I like Miama Nueva as a handwriting font - it's elegant but still (relatively) readable for a handwriting font. Here is a sample:

Miama Nueva supports alphabets from the following languages: Arabic, Cyrillic, Euro, Hebrew, Greek, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, Western European

There are also plenty of informal handwriting fonts available, but one thing I noticed is that handwriting fonts generally tend to have less of a range of language support than other categories of fonts. So if you need anything other than a basic Latin or Western European character set, this may limit your choice of handwriting font.

Most original font - start typing and the same letter gets shown in different ways!

TT2020 Style F is very exciting. If you type the same letter multiple times, it's shown in different ways each time: there are several versions of each letter. The TT2020 font comes in several different styles on FontLibrary (A through G). The other styles have much smaller differences between the different versions of the same letter so it's harder to see the full effect with those. Here is a sample of TT2020 Style F:

TT2020 supports these alphabets: Baltic, Basic Cyrillic, Basic Latin, Central European, Esperanto, Euro, Hebrew, Romanian, Turkish, Western European

Which fonts do you like to use?