There are Unicode typefaces which are open-source and designed to contain glyphs of all Unicode characters, or at least a broad selection of Unicode scripts. There are also numerous projects aimed at providing only a certain script, such as the Arabeyes Arabic font. The advantage of targeting only some scripts with a font was that certain Unicode characters should be rendered differently depending on which language they are used in, and that a font that only includes the characters a certain user needs will be much smaller in file size compared to one with many glyphs. Unicode fonts in modern formats such as OpenType can in theory cover multiple languages by including multiple glyphs per character, though very few actually cover more than one language's forms of the unified Han characters.
The Free UCS Outline Fonts[1] (also known as freefont) is a font collection project. The project was started by Primož Peterlin and is currently administered by Steve White. The aim of this project has been to produce a package of fonts by collecting existing free fonts and special donations, to support as many Unicode characters as possible. The font family is released as GNU FreeFont under the GNU General Public License. It also supports several font formats, including PostScript, TrueType, and OpenType. For this reason the fonts are derived from original work made in FontForge, and stored in .sfd (Spline Font Database) files. The most recent release is from May 2012.
SIL fonts
SIL International offers a large number of fonts, editors, translation and book production systems[2] as part of their goal to bridge the digital divide to minority languages. This site contains many utilities for Windows systems, including right-to-left editors, keymappers, RTF translators, and high-quality, free Unicode fonts.
SIL publish their fonts under their own SIL Open Font License. Typefaces include Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, Gentium and Andika.
The IndUni fonts are a GPL-licensed font family with many accents and combining characters, especially suitable for Indic, Indian and Nepali (Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi) and Middle Eastern languages and Urdu in transliteration. It also includes characters for Avestan and for the Pinyin representation of Chinese, a set of Cyrillic characters and a basic set of Greek letters. The fonts implement almost the whole of the Multilingual European Subset 1 of Unicode. Also provided are keyboard handlers for Windows and the Mac, making input easy.
Noto is a font family designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard. It is designed with the goal of achieving visual harmony (e.g., compatible heights and stroke thicknesses) across multiple languages/scripts. Commissioned by Google, the font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License.[5] Until September 2015, the fonts were under the Apache License 2.0.[6]
Kurinto is a large collection of Pan-Unicode, OFL-licensed TrueType fonts. The intended use-case is academic publishing, especially when authoring in Microsoft Word and publishing to PDF. The primary goal is to address issues when mixing languages using Latin script with secondary languages using other scripts.[10] Most of the italic faces are not true italics; they are slanted versions of the corresponding regular ones (oblique types). However, those of the included "Metric-Compatible Typeface" serifs are (having round letterforms, a Florin sign ƒ, etc).
Larabie Fonts
In August 2020, Ray Larabie released a library of early fonts from the 1990s, prior to the establishment of his professional digital type firm Typodermic Fonts, into the public domain. Most of the fonts that were released were "experimental, interesting, or simply lousy" and were no longer of any commercial value. Larabie released another batch of fonts into the public domain in November 2022, and another—which included fonts from Typodermic and fonts he considered "good" but did not perform well in sales or downloads—in April 2024.[11][12] (Larabie retained copyright on other fonts from the Larabie Fonts that he continues to license and sell through Typodermic, and has withheld others that turned out to be derivative works of copyrighted material.[12]) The fonts vary widely in their Unicode coverage.
Larabie had previously released the pan-Unicode "Canada 1500" into the public domain as a gesture to the Canadian sesquicentennial in 2017.[13]
Designed with the symbols needed for programming with the APL programming language. Contains three fonts, APL385 (monospace), APL2741 (a deprecated italic last updated in 2003) and APL333 (proportional).
Created by Ray Larabie for the Canadian sesquicentennial; released into the public domain shortly before Canada Day 2017. A pan-Unicode extension of Larabie's "Mesmerize" (itself released into the public domain in 2024), in turn inspired by Kabel and Semplicità.
One of the few free software fonts that includes the whole CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C block, as well as many other (related) CJKV characters, such as the Kangxi Radicals and CJK Radicals Supplement blocks.
IBM Plex is designed and developed by Mike Abbink at IBM in collaboration with Bold Monday. It is the replacement of Helvetica as the corporate typeface.
Liberation is the collective name of four TrueType font families: Liberation Sans, Liberation Sans Narrow, Liberation Serif and Liberation Mono. These fonts are metrically compatible with Monotype Corporation's Arial, Arial Narrow, Times New Roman, and Courier New (respectively). Versions since 2.00 use OFL while older versions use GPL + font exception.
Linux Libertine is a digital typeface created by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create free and open alternatives to proprietary typefaces such as Times Roman.
Created by the KDE community, this font is optimised for the FreeType font rendering system and works well in all graphical user interfaces, desktops and devices. Alternative download at fontsquirrel.com
Loosely and indirectly based on Helvetica. Primarily Latin and Cyrillic glyphs. The 2024 revision is under copyright with permission required for derivative works and redistribution.
Part of a suite of "Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts" that also included Alexander (an italic Garamond), Anaktoria (grecs du roi), and other specialty fonts. The last updated version of the fonts without an end user license agreement were released in February 2018 (Symbola version 10.24). A restrictive personal-use-only, no-derivative-works, no-redistribution license has been attached to all versions since February 2018 (Symbola version 11).
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