GNU FreeFont

The family includes three faces: FreeMono, FreeSans, and FreeSerif, each in four styles (Regular, Italic/Oblique, Bold, and Bold Italic/Oblique).

The fonts are licensed under the GPL-3.0-or-later license with the Font-exception-2.0, ensuring they may be both freely distributed and embedded or otherwise utilized within a document without the document itself being covered by the GPL. The fonts can be obtained libre from GNU Savannah. They are also packaged on certain Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Arch Linux.

Design

The glyphs of GNU FreeFont come from many sources, all of which are compatible with the GPL.

The core Latin characters are derived from the Type 1 fonts donated by URW++ to the Ghostscript project. Specifically, the design notes of GNU FreeFont state that:

• FreeSerif is based on URW++ Nimbus Roman No. 9 L, which is similar to Times
• FreeSans is based on URW++ Nimbus Sans L, which is similar to Helvetica
• FreeMono is based on URW++ Nimbus Mono L, which is similar to Courier

The Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, and International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) characters are partially based on Omega, which is an extension of TeX. The Greek characters are also based on a set of Greek Type 1 fonts compiled by Angelo Haritsis, in addition to Alexey Kryukov's Tempora LCG Unicode. The Cyrillic range also includes Valek Filipov's Gnome Cyrillic and Tempora LCG Unicode. Valek Filippov further added some composite Latin Extended-A glyphs.

The Devanagari range in serif is from the Velthuis TeX font, while the range in sans is based on Gargi; Bengali and Gurmukhi ranges are based on Harsh Kumar's BharatBhasha project and others. The Gujarati and Oriya ranges are based on Samyak fonts. The Ethiopic range is based on the Ethiopic metafont project at the University of Hamburg.