Off the Beat: Bruce Byfield's Blog

Bruce Byfield

Like Linux desktops, free-licensed fonts started as imitations of proprietary equivalents. Today, original free fonts are becoming increasingly common, but the demand for free equivalents of proprietary fonts remains. This demand is unlikely to disapear because, although most professional designers think in terms of proprietary fonts, clients are often unwilling to pay for them. Moreover, free software advocates prefer free fonts to go along with their free applications.

Exact equivalents are rare because of fear of copyright restrictions. A match as high as 75% is rare. Some equivalents, such as the Liberation fonts, are only metrical – that is, they take up the same space as their proprietary equivalents, but the letters themselves are different. In other cases, the free fonts are inspired by their proprietary counterparts, but the designer never intended exact copies, and the most you can expect is a general resemblance. A few proprietary fonts, such as Optima, have no free equivalent at all, so far as I can see. For this reason, the listings in the table below are mostly the closest equivalents, and rarely exact replicas.

Most of these fonts can be found on Google Fonts. The list is as complete as I can make it If you have any other equivalents, let me know and I'll add them to the list.

Proprietary Font Free Licensed Equivalent Alternate Gothic #1 League Gothic Arial Liberation Sans,* Pt Sans, Open Sans Condensed, Lato Arial Narrow Liberation Sans Narrow* Avenir Mint Spirit No2, Nunito Baskerville Baskervald ADF Standard Bembo EB Garamond Bodoni Accanthis-Std, Oranienbaum Caladea Cambria* Calibri Carlito* Centaur Coelacanth Century Gothic Muli Comic Sans Comic Relief Courier Liberation Mono Courier 10 Pitch Courier Code* Courier New Cousine Eurostile Jura Frutiger Istok Normal 400 Futura Mint Spirit No2, Nunito Futura Light Futura Renner Light Garamond** Crimson Text, EB Garamond Georgia Nimbus Roman No. 9 Gill Sans Cabin, Gillius ADF, Hammersmith One, Railway Regular, Raleway Goudy Old Style** Goudy Bookletter 1911, Linden Hill, Sort Mills Helvetica Liberation Sans,* Pt Sans, Open Sans Condensed, Lato Helvetica Narrow Liberation Sans Narrow* Joanna Fanwood Letter Gothic Josefin Sans, Josefin Slab Myriad Junction, Pt. Sans News Gothic News Cycle Stone Sans Nunito Stone Serif Lustria Tahoma Lucida Sans, Nimbus Sans Times New Roman Liberation Serif,* Linux Libertine* Trajan Cinzel Univers Universalist-std Verdana DejaVu Sans

* Metrical equivalents

** "Garamond" amd "Goudy" are generic for fonts inspired by particular designers. The closeness of the equivalent depends on which font you trying to match.

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