Where to find fonts for your games

It's been mentioned several times in the past that one necessary thing OGA lacks is a decent selection of fonts.  In fact, I would venture to say that in general it's been very difficult to find good, free fonts out on the internet.  Of course, there are a lot of sites out there with tons of "free" fonts, but when you look closely at them, you'll discover that the random and arbitrary licensing restrictions on most of said fonts prevent you from using them for any sort of serious work, either Open Source or commercial.

So what's a FOSS developer to do?  Well, until recently, the only options were to (a) rely on certain standard font families that come preinstalled on most machines, (b) package some of the few existing fonts (such as the Liberation fonts) that are known to be safely licensed, or (c) roll your own, which is a ton of work.

Enter the Open Font Library.  As of the time of this post, the Open Font Library hosts 170 different fonts (and growing), all licensed in such a way (either Public Domain or the Debian-approved SIL Open Font License) that they're completely safe to use in any Open Source or proprietary software, commercial or otherwise.

But don't take my word for it.  Go check the site out for yourself, and if you're feeling up to it, contribute a font of your own!

Bart

 

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the link to the ofl is broken

the link to the ofl is broken

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good catch. :)

Fixed.

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Difficult to navigate but great site!

I'm looking at it now and I'm already having problems with the site. I searched under the term "future", "sci-fi" and "scifi". Scifi/sci-fi doesn't show anything, and "future" shows incorrect fonts. I think it's because they search by the text comments, etc rather then the tags.

Something which I think could be improved is if a picture of the font was included in the search results and not just the font details screen. This would let you quickly see which fonts are more relevant to you.

I eventually found what I wanted but in a way that I don't think most people would have tried. I browsed the tags and then used my browser's search to find the correct sci-fi tag "science_fiction".

Apart from these small usability issues the site is great. Something that I've been looking for is decent fonts that are free to use and distribute.

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Same

I encounter exactly the same difficulties as Andrew. A preview picture is a must for any serious font site.

Still very useful as you state, there was no such site until now!

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