Sorts Mill Goudy
Barry SchwartzSphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Serif · 1 weight · OFL · Türkçe
Free Goudy Old Style alternatives
Frederic Goudy for ATF, 1915, and the American book serif for most of the century that followed.
Why people look for a Goudy Old Style alternative
Goudy Old Style is warm, slightly irregular and unmistakably early twentieth century American. Frederic Goudy's design is long out of copyright; the digitisations are not, and they vary enough that a substitution judged on the name rather than on the shapes will disappoint.
What a Goudy Old Style substitute has to get right
The diamond-shaped dots, the upturned ear on the g, and a colour on the page that is slightly heavy and slightly irregular. Regularise it and it turns into any other old-style.
The one in this archive
One entry, because one is the honest answer. A face is listed here only if the substitution would survive a designer looking at both.
Goudy Old Style and its free alternatives, at a glance
- How you get it
- Bought from a foundry under a commercial licence
- Pass it on, embed it or self-host it
- Only as the licence you bought allows
- On a website
- Usually a separate web licence on top
Goudy Old Style
| Property | Sorts Mill Goudy |
|---|---|
| Licence | OFL-1.1 — free, commercial use allowed |
| Weights | 400 |
| Variable | No |
| Italic | Yes |
| Türkçe | Yes |
| Other alphabets | Latin only |
| Glyphs | 626 |
| Web font | 37 KB |
Questions
- What is the best free alternative to Goudy Old Style?
- Sorts Mill Goudy — it is the closest match in this archive, and the page above says which shapes the substitution turns on. It is the only one listed, because one honest match is a better answer than a longer list of near misses.
- Are these Goudy Old Style alternatives free for commercial use?
- Yes. Every font on this site is under a licence that permits commercial use with no fee and no attribution requirement, mostly the SIL Open Font License. That covers paid client work, products you sell, self-hosting on a website, and embedding in an application. The licence file is inside every download.
- Can I use a Goudy Old Style alternative in a logo?
- Yes. An open font licence covers the font software rather than the shapes you set with it, so a logo made with one of these can be trademarked like any other. What you cannot do is claim rights over the typeface itself.
- Will a Goudy Old Style substitute keep my layout the same?
- Only if it is metrically compatible — drawn so every character occupies the same width as the original, which makes a document reflow identically. Very few faces are, and where one is, this site says so on its page. Everything else will look similar and set differently, so a layout built to the original's widths needs checking rather than assuming.