Every typeface, documented.
font.io is the encyclopedia of type: history, specimens, licensing, and free alternatives for every commercial and freeware typeface ever made.
font.io is the encyclopedia of type: history, specimens, licensing, and free alternatives for every commercial and freeware typeface ever made.
Reference is only half the site. These work while you read.
Naming a typeface? Screen a candidate name against thousands of existing fonts and known trademarks before you commit to it, and generate fresh candidates when every good name seems taken.
Releasing a font and unsure how to license it? Answer at most five questions about how you want it used, and the picker names the license that fits, with the citation line for your download.
PowerPoint refuses to embed a font whose permission bits say no? Drop the font in and rewrite the bits in your browser. Nothing uploads, ever.
Type history, font law, and the measurements behind the encyclopedia, published as we research them.
Three kinds of pixel font share one look: files that carry the raster inside them, outlines traced from a historical bitmap, and vector drawings in pixel costume. The measured evidence that tells them apart: strike headers, per-axis grids, cell fidelity, native sizes, and the calibration that found the exceptions.
A language claim on a font can fail at four levels: the characters can be missing, the slots can hold the wrong drawings, the national letterforms can be absent, or the script's shaping behavior can be broken. Four tests, run against the font files themselves.
The character map is a font's promise about what it contains. Symbol cmaps hide glyphs behind an offset, dingbats park pictures on letter slots, old script fonts file one alphabet under another's names, and one demo font we measured answers 158 of its slots with the same watermark.
Not a download farm. A reference work: every entry researched, every specimen rendered from the real font files.
Designer, foundry, year, classification, and history for every typeface, commercial and freeware alike.
Full character sets rendered large from the actual font files. What you see is what the font is.
What you can actually do with each font (desktop, web, app, commercial) in plain language.
Quality open-source lookalikes for expensive commercial faces, for when the budget says no.