this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2025
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What are some less known or underused open source fonts?

top 44 comments
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[–] ratel@mander.xyz 53 points 1 week ago (9 children)

I love this hyperlegible one from the Braille Institute: https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

[–] shyguyblue@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

I'm going to see if I can get this on my Kobo. Thank you for the link!

[–] 2910000@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ooh there's a monospace version too

[–] DetachablePianist@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

this is the way

[–] TheBat@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

⠊⠝⠞⠑⠗⠑⠎⠞⠊⠝⠛

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

I use this, it's good.

[–] chelatna@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

I love this font I was going to say this too.

[–] Pirate@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago

Came looking for this comment! It’s my favorite font of all time. So clean and legible.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

do any applications contain them by default? As much as I like the fonts my email is to much a price to pay given the fonts I use are fine.

[–] ratel@mander.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

You can get it from Google fonts which means you can easily download / import it into another application if that helps. One of the other replies also linked another source. I just provided the official link because they have a nice rationale on the design choices.

[–] randombullet@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago

It doesn't take my duck.com alias

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Do I really need to give them an email to download? Why?

[–] BurgerBaron@piefed.social 5 points 1 week ago

They're part of my Linux distro's repo. ttf-atkinson-hyperlegible and otf-atkinson-hyperlegible.

Windows mirror: https://font.download/font/atkinson-hyperlegible

[–] trk@aussie.zone 1 points 1 week ago

You can just type any old bollocks in there and it reveals the download links.

[–] ratel@mander.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

IDK I'm not affiliated with them but maybe use a throwaway email alias.

[–] coreray00@discuss.online 31 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Shout out to 0xProto! Texture healing in a monospaced font is super cool!

[–] tuckerm@feddit.online 5 points 1 week ago

Interesting! I hadn't heard of this before, I'll have to check it out.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 3 points 1 week ago

and actually useful ligatures to boot! neat.

[–] mechanismatic@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There are too many to mention since there's so much out there.

You can go to a font website like dafont and perform a search for a font or browse different themes/styles and specify in the results that you want Public domain / GPL / OFL fonts.

Almost all of my fonts are released under an attribution license, so they're free for commercial use and remixing.

https://michaelwmoss.com/typefaces

[–] SpaceXplorer_8042@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

Definitely a lot of fonts I'd very much like using whenever I need a new font next. Thanks!

[–] chunes@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

Agave. My favorite monospace/programming font. What I like best about it is how the baseline isn't where the descenders begin. Makes it look unique in a nice way.

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Merriweather is great for longer texts. I use it in all book reader apps.

Anonymous Pro is my coding font of choice.

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

I second the Anonymous Pro!

[–] vivalapivo@lemmy.today 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

For those who love comic sans I might have bad news: you might be borderline dyslexic.

Switching to OpenDyslexic 3 helps

[–] TheUnicornOfPerfidy@feddit.uk 9 points 1 week ago

OpenDyslexic is less good for most dyslexics than you think. It's based on some ideas of what might be useful rather than specific evidence. I recomend Sylexiad instead. Particularly Sylexiad Sans rather than Serif, but it's all about finding what works best for you.

[–] amos@mander.xyz 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)
[–] tuckerm@feddit.online 4 points 1 week ago

M+ 1m has been my daily monospaced font ever since I found it, which is about eight years now. I don't see it come up often when people talk about monospaced fonts.

[–] lucg@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I see lots of links here but no reasons why each is underused or anything.

Look, I'm a simple person, what I ask of a font is:

  • differentiate your symbols — I'm talking 1, l, I, and i with more than a single pixel difference at 11pt 90DPI, and the 0 should be clearly less round than O
  • be readable. No extra thinness, fancy swirls... look at any default font as an example (Arial or whatever), or most people's custom web font as a counter-example
  • proportionally spaced. I like \thinspace as thousand separator and I cannot lie
  • indefinitely usable (for example as part of a game) after a single purchase that I can do as a consumer. Or free/donationware of course

A very tall order I know. So far I've reviewed a bunch of fonts (I wasn't procrastinating why do you ask) and found PT Sans is the best option I've seen, so I'm using it, but I hate its Q. It's basically an O with a tilde below it. Any better options if all you want is clarity and normalcy?

Edit: near the bottom of the replies there's Hyperlegible. Somehow I had read over that. Seems to check the boxes! I'll be looking at this closer on my computer later.

[–] MantisToboggon@lazysoci.al 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] tuckerm@feddit.online 4 points 1 week ago

Literally the only thing we miss out on when ditching Windows.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago

I don't know it it's underused, but my go to for years gas been League Spartan from The League of Moveable Type

[–] JetpackJackson@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Ärzte Sans (edit: missed the open source part. I can't verify that)

[–] watson387@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] JetpackJackson@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago

Huh til theres an aur package, I just plunked it in my fonts directory

[–] kshade@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

It's freeware not open source but I like Monofur. Might not be the most beautiful font but I find it very legible and the distinction between similar characters is quite good. It's available in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories too.

[–] blurb@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

Here's a nice list of open source Japanese monospace fonts:
https://github.com/tsunesan3/awsome-jp-coding-fonts
I'd say they're likely pretty unknown because it took me around 30 minutes to find this list after searching for nice JP monospace fonts and not finding much.

[–] SpaceXplorer_8042@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

I'd say several fonts on Google Fonts (the only place I know lol) are pretty good. I don't see them mentioned anywhere and I'm not a font enthusiast per se, so I'd call them less known. Some of my favourite - Courier Pro, Doto, Sono, SUSE Mono, Josefin Slab, and Martian Mono.

And a couple others default on my Windows PC that I like: Bookman Old Style, Yu Gothic (Fun fact - this font was used by the hit anime Neon Genesis Evangelion for their english title cards) and wierdly enough, Segoe UI. I love that Windows 8 aesthetic it brought.

[–] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

I really like Open Sans

[–] ace_garp@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Muli !

My favourite

Search at http://openfontlibrary.com/

[–] theherk@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

This doesn’t add anything to the post, so, sorry, but this is a really good question! Thanks for contributing!

What open source don't should I use for high compatability and legibility?