Liberation fonts, Noto fonts, Deja Vu fonts and Nimbus fonts pretty much. Add in Cantarell too and you are set I would say. Those are the ones you should install for compatibility.
I always install Inter for UI and JetBrains Mono for terminal usage. I find they render way better than pretty much anything else.
Update: Discovered Geist and Geist Mono and they are amazing, I am going to replace Inter and JetBrains Mono from now on: github.com/vercel/geist-font
Iosevka is so great. Not everyone likes the narrow look. I’ve tried other fonts a couple of times since I stumbled on it a good handfuls of years ago, but I always come back.
Not OP, but if you look at the Hello World code example, the “HelloWorld” class is visually divided at the l’s and the o and W are glued together. Looks more like “Hel l oWorld”.
If it works for you, that’s fine. You are right with the monospaced font being limited to the boxes. Jetbrains mono uses ligatures to overcome certain spacing limits. On top of this some characters are designed to connect better to their surroundings, as the „l“ mentioned, which is not just a stroke, but connects to the neighboring characters with the top and bottom strokes.
Yeah I fucking love that font. Better than Noto Mono because in Inconsolata the zeros have a cross through them and therefore it’s easier to distinguish them from the letter O.
The only downside is that it hasn’t been updated since 2015-12-04 and thus only has “the base ASCII set and … the Latin 1, 2, and 9 complements”. So it works for most English-speaking purposes, but runs into problems if you try to use certain symbols used outside of that context, like other languages or some special characters. I don’t run into it often enough to be too much of a problem, but it is there.
Like I said, I don’t really run into it enough to need another piece of software installed on my computer, but that is definitely something I need to keep in the back of my mind. It seems delightful! ^_____^ Thank you!
I always install the Noto fonts for things like emojis and asian characters, extra fonts to cover the Cyrillic alphabet, and finally OnePlus’s Slate font, which I fell in love with back in the days when I rocked a OnePlus 7 Pro.
If you don’t want to get them from microsoft, you can purchase a license elsewhere. Microsoft allows them to be distributed freely as long as the files are not modified. That’s why they are always packaged in an executable installer.
Those fonts are not free. They may be just ttf files, but there is a massive amount of work that goes into creating a font with unicode support. If you just want fonts for basic compatibility, you can use open source fonts with compatible metrics such as the Liberation fonts or use the microsoft core fonts that haven’t been updated in 20 years.
Many fonts have a license that allows them to be embedded in a pdf. Newer fonts usually have a flag that tells the software if the font can be embedded or not, not all software respects that flag though. Older fonts don’t have the flag and will embed even if you are not allowed to embed them.
Thanks for the info! So the entire .ttf package is embedded, or every single character as SVG? Damn that sounds like a waste of space compared to HTML where fonts with alternatives and fallback also work.
Libertinus Serif (much nicer Times New Roman-ish serif text font. Huge amount of glyphs, open source font license, great to read on display and on print)
Lato (Sans font which imo compliments Libertinus Serif really good. More for short texts, headlines etc. I wouldn’t recommend it as a UI font. Also permissive font license.)
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