Open Source fonts - Anything close to what I seek?
August 7, 2012 3:54 PM   Subscribe

Hi, from my research it appears that Cochin and Modern No. 20 are only available as paid fonts. I'm looking for free, open source approximations of these fonts for use on a web project. Any recommendations?
posted by samoa to Media & Arts (3 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Computer Modern Roman (a.k.a. That One TeX/LaTeX font) was apparently modeled on Modern No. 20. If I remember right, it's stylistically similar but not a perfect indistinguishable clone. There are now free versions of it for use by normal non-TeX-using human beings.
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:21 PM on August 7, 2012 [1 favorite]


Best answer: How are you planning to use the fonts? Free fonts are often of debatable quality that may not be apparent up front. All too often in the case of known families like this they're straight rip-offs of commercial files. Also, free fonts often still have commercial-use restrictions on them, if that applies to you.

Is the open-source factor actually required, or are you just tacking that onto free? "Open-source" fonts, whatever that ultimately means(cf. some of this commentary around Adobe's recent announcement), are still relatively unusual.

On the other hand actual Modern No. 20 and Cochin can be had for embedding at only about fifty bucks each. (Linotype have some other Cochins; that's the cheapest.) If you've done much more than the briefest looking around, your time spent researching might've already cost you more than just paying for them.

Theano Modern and Latin Modern at FontSquirrel seem decent though once you start looking at details you'll notice they lack some of the variance in stroke width and tend to run lighter in appearance, etc. Both as far as I can tell are actually open, though use two different licenses which you'll have to review yourself.
posted by Su at 5:53 PM on August 7, 2012


Response by poster: Thanks to both of you - Su, I did find "webfont" versions of these fonts from myfonts.com for about $50.00 for both, the prices I had seen before were much higher, but this worked for me.
posted by samoa at 7:41 PM on August 7, 2012


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