How we work

Only typefaces whose licence allows them to be redistributed and used commercially: the SIL Open Font License, the Apache License 2.0, the Ubuntu Font Licence, or a release into the public domain. A font offered “free for personal use” is not free to pass on, whatever else it allows, and is never added.

Every family is taken from its published source — for almost all of them the Google Fonts repository — and republished unmodified. The download is built by a script that refuses to write a zip without the font’s own licence file inside it, and the site will not build with a download missing. When a family arrived upstream without its licence file, it was left out rather than given a copied one: the notice in a licence is specific to the font.

Nobody types in which alphabets a font covers. When a font is added, its own character table is read and compared against a fixed list of 12 alphabets. A font is credited with an alphabet only if every one of that alphabet’s test characters is in the file — partial coverage is treated as no coverage, because half the Greek alphabet sends somebody away with missing letters.

Türkçe is checked separately from Latin, on the dotless ı, the dotted capital İ, ğ and ş in both cases, because a font can look perfect in English and still be unusable in Turkish. The character map on every font page is drawn from the same file and shows only characters the font really contains.

Style tags come from a fixed vocabulary of 25 terms, each with a one-line definition on the styles page. Before a font is tagged or described, its specimen is set large and compared with faces already in the archive. That order matters: about one first draft in three turns out wrong when written from what a font is usually called rather than from what it draws.

Some calls that came out of looking: Titillium Web is filed as humanist, not grotesque, because its apertures are open and its terminals angled. Pacifico is monolinear — at 200px its stroke barely changes weight, whatever its reputation. Cinzel is a display face rather than a serif, because its lowercase is a set of small capitals and there is no minuscule to read a paragraph in.

A font is named as a stand-in for a commercial typeface only if the substitution would survive a designer looking at both. Today 39 of the 312 fonts carry such a claim, across 31 commercial faces; the rest are left empty on purpose, because a flattering near-match is the fastest way to discredit the whole list.

Where a claim can be sourced it is: Besley is a revival of Robert Besley’s own Clarendon and is named after him. Where it is a judgement, the reason is written on the alternatives page. Cabin is always described as a Gill Sans relative and was left off that list — its g is a different letter and its proportions are narrower. The names of commercial typefaces are other people’s trademarks, used only to say what can be set instead of them.

File sizes, glyph counts, the weight a variable font installs as in older software, and the date each font page last changed are all written by scripts that read the files themselves. A figure typed into a sentence goes stale the first time a font is rebuilt, so the site is built to refuse one: the articles and guides read their numbers from the same data the font pages do.

Mistakes get fixed in the open. Some that have been:

• IM Fell English’s preview was drawn from the italic file, because the file names gave no clue which was which. Previews are now chosen from the font’s own metadata.
• The preview files contain Latin only, so Arabic, Greek and Cyrillic fonts were shown in the visitor’s system fonts. Every font page now draws those alphabets from the complete font.
• Major Mono Display was described backwards — it has no lowercase, not no capitals. Several other descriptions credited fonts with alphabets their files do not contain; the measured list is now read before any sentence is written.

If something here is wrong, write to [email protected]. If a font is listed that should not be, the takedown page says what to send.