Ask HN: Show me some most beautiful fonts

42 points by deccanchargers ↗ HN
Serif, Sans Serif or Mono , Show me some most beautiful fonts that are unique.

Open Source or Free fonts are appreciated.

41 comments

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Gentium is an open and free font with amazing quality and character coverage: https://software.sil.org/gentium/

Deja Vu is also open, and pretty nice for screen usage.

As for non-free fonts, I love Gill Sans.

I’ll take the liberty to expand on my previous answer:

I’m a sucker for classic typefaces. E.g. Garamond, Goudy Old Style, New Century Schoolbook. My favourite sans-serif is Helvetica.

Miller by Carter et al is a nice serif that’s a little more recent.

Publico looks good for headings.

Two nice open source typefaces are Noto Serif and PT Serif.

Perhaps it's only because of Knuth's books, but I've always liked the fonts in the Computer Modern series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern

Note that the plain serif font in Computer Modern is a beautiful font for high resolution screens or printing, but has thin serifs not as suitable for low resolution at small font sizes.

This one is quite well-known already, but I think Univers is beautiful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univers

Apparently, Frutiger said that "Helvetica is the jeans, and Univers the dinner jacket." I think that's appropriate.

I'm also fond of FF Scala and FF Scala Sans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FF_Scala

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FF_Scala_Sans

Sadly, these are not open source. But they all have a relatively large number of glyphs.

If you want something open-source and with a ̶H̶U̶U̶U̶G̶E̶ largish number of glyphs, here is Junicode: https://github.com/psb1558/Junicode-New

Since 2017 I have used the Go (Golang) Monospace TrueType fonts:

https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts

They are clear, unambiguous, and pleasing to the eye!

Nice. Reminds me of fonts that used to be available in the X Window System.
Of the three, my favorites:

* Serif: Bitter (https://www.huertatipografica.com/en/fonts/bitter-ht) or maybe Vollkorn (http://vollkorn-typeface.com)

* Mono: Iosevka

* Sans-serif: maybe Fira Sans Condensed, previously perhaps DTL Prokyon.

I haven't seen any sans-serif fonts I've really loved in recent memory. I feel like most sans-serifs just influence from Helvetica and are really boring, lack character or creativity. I'd love to see if anyone here has any examples of novel or interesting sans serifs.

(I also know that good typography doesn't distract from the content, but even under that ideal I still find most modern sans serifs boring).

Love Iosevka. I switched from Source Code Pro to Iosevka, I used in vim and vscode.
Not open source or free but I find PragmataPro [0] to be absolutely gorgeous. Iosevka comes close but I don't think it'll ever be able to bridge the gap for me.

[0] https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/

What makes you like Pragmata Pro better? Do you think it's almost $250 dollars better than Iosevka?

Great fonts bring me a lot of joy, but Pragmata Pro always felt fairly ridiculously priced to me. I know the author put a lot of time into it, but 99% of the font's features are irrelevant to me (I'll never use Hebrew, for instance, or even the non-mono version of the font).

Essential PragmataPro has a reduced character set for €19. I do think it's $250 dollars better than Iosevka. What convinced me is manual hinting.
Wow that font is excellent.

Honestly I've never thought to buy a font unless I was using it for web or print... but I may have to buy that just for myself.

Source Serif Pro is my Google Docs workhorse .