
There areUnicode typefaces which areopen-source and designed to containglyphs of allUnicode characters, or at least a broad selection ofUnicode scripts. There are also numerous projects aimed at providing only a certain script, such as theArabeyes Arabic font. The advantage of targeting only some scripts with afont was that certain Unicode characters should be rendered differently depending on which language they are used in, and that a font that only includes the characters a certain user needs will be much smaller in file size compared to one with many glyphs. Unicode fonts in modern formats such asOpenType can in theory cover multiple languages by including multiple glyphs per character, though very few actually cover more than one language's forms of theunified Han characters.
TheFixed X11 public-domain core bitmap fonts have provided substantial Unicode coverage since 1997.
GNU Unifont is abitmap-based font created by Roman Czyborra that is present in most freeoperating systems and windowing systems such asLinux,XFree86 or theX.Org Server. The font is released under theGNU General Public License Version 2+ with a font embedding exception.
TheFree UCS Outline Fonts[1] (also known asfreefont) is a font collection project. The project was started by Primož Peterlin and is currently administered by Steve White. The aim of this project has been to produce a package of fonts by collecting existing free fonts and special donations, to support as many Unicode characters as possible. The font family is released asGNU FreeFont under theGNU General Public License. It also supports several font formats, includingPostScript,TrueType, andOpenType. For this reason the fonts are derived from original work made inFontForge, and stored in .sfd (Spline Font Database) files. The most recent release is from May 2012.
SIL International offers a large number of fonts, editors, translation and book production systems[2] as part of their goal to bridge thedigital divide to minority languages. This site contains many utilities for Windows systems, including right-to-left editors, keymappers, RTF translators, and high-quality, free Unicode fonts.SIL publish their fonts under their ownSIL Open Font License. Typefaces includeCharis SIL,Doulos SIL,Gentium andAndika.
Mark Williamson's MPH 2B Damase is a free font encoding many non-Latin scripts, including the Unicode 4.1 scripts in theSupplementary Multilingual Plane:Armenian, Cherokee, Coptic,Cypriot Syllabary,Cyrillic, Deseret, Georgian,Glagolitic, Gothic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Limbu,Linear B (partial coverage), Old Italic,Old Persian cuneiform,Osmanya,Phoenician,Shavian,Syloti Nagri (no conjuncts),Tai Le (no combining tone marks),Thaana,Tifinagh,Ugaritic, andVietnamese.[3]
The IndUni fonts are a GPL-licensed font family with many accents and combining characters, especially suitable for Indic, Indian and Nepali (Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi) and Middle Eastern languages and Urdu in transliteration. It also includes characters for Avestan and for the Pinyin representation of Chinese, a set of Cyrillic characters and a basic set of Greek letters. The fonts implement almost the whole of the Multilingual European Subset 1 of Unicode. Also provided are keyboard handlers for Windows and the Mac, making input easy.
They are based on fonts designed byURW++ Design and Development Incorporated, and offer lookalikes forCourier,Helvetica,Times,Palatino, andNew Century Schoolbook.[4]
Noto is a font family designed to cover all the scripts encoded in theUnicode standard. It is designed with the goal of achieving visual harmony (e.g., compatible heights and stroke thicknesses) across multiple languages/scripts. Commissioned byGoogle, the font is licensed under theSIL Open Font License.[5] Until September 2015, the fonts were under theApache License 2.0.[6]
Cascadia Code[7] is a purpose-builtTrueType font forWindows Terminal, the new command-line interface forMicrosoft Windows. It includes programmingligatures and was designed to enhance the look and feel of Windows Terminal, terminal applications and text editors such asVisual Studio andVisual Studio Code. The font isopen source under theSIL Open Font License and available onGitHub.[8] It has been bundled with Windows Terminal since version 0.5.2762.0.[9]
Kurinto is a large collection of Pan-Unicode, OFL-licensedTrueType fonts. The intended use-case is academic publishing, especially when authoring inMicrosoft Word and publishing toPDF. The primary goal is to address issues when mixing languages usingLatin script with secondary languages using other scripts.[10] Most of the italic faces are not true italics; they are slanted versions of the corresponding regular ones (oblique types). However, those of the included "Metric-Compatible Typeface" serifs are (having roundletterforms, aFlorin sign ƒ, etc).
In August 2020,Ray Larabie released a library of early fonts from the 1990s, prior to the establishment of his professional digital type firm Typodermic Fonts, into the public domain. Most of the fonts that were released were "experimental, interesting, or simply lousy" and were no longer of any commercial value. Larabie released another batch of fonts into the public domain in November 2022, and another—which included fonts from Typodermic and fonts he considered "good" but did not perform well in sales or downloads—in April 2024.[11][12] (Larabie retained copyright on other fonts from the Larabie Fonts that he continues to license and sell through Typodermic, and has withheld others that turned out to bederivative works of copyrighted material.[12]) The fonts vary widely in their Unicode coverage.
Larabie had previously released the pan-Unicode "Canada 150" into the public domain as a gesture to theCanadian sesquicentennial in 2017.[13]
| Font name | License | Date / version | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amiri Font | OFL | 2020-06-02 / 0.113 | Digitalization of a Naskh styled Arabic metal typeface by the Bulaq Press of Cairo, Egypt |
| APL fonts | Public domain | 2013-04-20 | Designed with the symbols needed for programming with theAPL programming language. Contains three fonts, APL385 (monospace), APL2741 (a deprecated italic last updated in 2003) and APL333 (proportional). |
| BabelStone Han | Arphic Public License | 2024-03-15 / 15.1.4 | A unicodeCJK font with over 41,000 Han characters (hanzi, kanji, hanja), and over 53,000 unicode characters currently. |
| Bitstream Vera | Bitstream Vera fonts licenseArchived 2011-02-03 at theWayback Machine | 2003-04-16 / 1.10 | |
| Canada1500 | Public domain (CC0) | 2017-06-19 / 1.100 | Created byRay Larabie for theCanadian sesquicentennial; released into the public domain shortly beforeCanada Day 2017. A pan-Unicode extension of Larabie's "Mesmerize" (itself released into the public domain in 2024), in turn inspired byKabel andSemplicità. |
| Cardo | OFL | 2011-04-20 / 1.04 | Unicode 6 andMUFI v3-compatible |
| Church Slavonic Fonts in Unicode collection | OFL | 2020-09-06 / 2.2 | A collection of fonts designed for Cyrillic and Glagolitic scripts used for the (Old)Church Slavonic liturgical language. |
| CMU family | OFL | 2012-08-29 / 0.7.0 | An updated version ofComputer Modern (CMU is an abbreviation for Computer Modern Unicode). |
| Culmus collection of fonts | GPL 2 + font exception | 2018-09-30 / 0.133 | A basic collection of Hebrew fonts aimed at Hebrew-speaking Linux and Unix community |
| DejaVu fonts | license | 2016-07-30 / 2.37[14] | A modification and wide extension of Bitstream Vera fonts |
| Droid fonts | Apache license | 2007 | A collection of fonts developed for Google'sAndroid mobile phone operating system |
| EB Garamond | OFL | 2011 | |
| ET Book | MIT | 2016-07-08 | |
| Fira Sans | OFL | 2018-03-20 / 4.3 | Commissioned forFirefox OS |
| Fixed | 1997 | The Fixed X11 public-domain core bitmap fonts have provided substantial Unicode coverage since 1997. | |
| Fixedsys Excelsior | public domain | 2007 / 3.01 | Based onFixedsys. |
| Gentium | OFL orBSD-like license | 2014-10-28 / 5.000 | |
| Ghostscript | GPL,AFPL,LPPL[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] | 2020-03-19 / 9.52 | URW ++ Type 1 fonts, a free alternatives to 35basic PostScript fonts—e.g. Type 1 version ofNimbus Roman No9 L,Nimbus Sans L,Nimbus Mono L, URW Bookman L, URW Gothic L and others |
| GNU Unifont | GPL-2.0-or-later withFont-exception-2.0 | 2025-11-01 / 17.0.03[23] | GNU Unifont is a bitmap-based font created by Roman Czyborra that is present in most free operating systems. |
| "Hanazono Fonts" (in Japanese and English). Archived fromthe original on 2010-04-12. Retrieved2009-07-13. | (permissive license) | 2017-09-04 | One of the few free software fonts that includes the wholeCJK Unified Ideographs Extension C block, as well as many other (related)CJKV characters, such as the Kangxi Radicals and CJK Radicals Supplement blocks. |
| Hussar | OFL | 2017-02-06 / 2.29 RC2 | Loosely based onSpartan. The most recent (2019)general release of Hussar has a somewhat smaller glyph set. |
| IBM Plex | OFL | 2019-06-05 / 2.0 | IBM Plex is designed and developed by Mike Abbink at IBM in collaboration with Bold Monday. It is the replacement of Helvetica as the corporate typeface. |
| Iosevka | OFL | 2025 / 32.5.0 | A monospaced pan-Unicode font |
| Jomolhari | OFL | Tibetan script | |
| Junicode | GPL | 2018-06-25 / 1.002 | |
| Kelvinch Font | OFL, free for any use | 2016-04-18 | Most Latin blocks fully populated + Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian & Runes. Comes in Roman, Italic, Bold & Bold Italic. |
| Kurinto Font Folio | OFL | 2020-07-26 / 2.196 | Pan-Unicode, 21 typefaces, 506 fonts, coverage of most of Unicode v12.1 plus many auxiliary scripts including theUCSUR. |
| Latin Modern | GUST licence | Another derivative of Computer Modern | |
| Lato | OFL | 2015-08-06 / 2.015 | Covers all Latin alphabets, along with Cyrillic, Greek, and IPA |
| Liberastika fonts | GPL + font exception | Is a derivative ofLiberation fonts with improvedCyrillic | |
| Liberation fonts | OFL | 2019-03-04 / 2.00.5 | Liberation is the collective name of four TrueType font families: Liberation Sans, Liberation Sans Narrow, Liberation Serif and Liberation Mono. These fonts are metrically compatible with Monotype Corporation's Arial, Arial Narrow, Times New Roman, and Courier New (respectively). Versions since 2.00 use OFL while older versions use GPL + font exception. |
| Linux Libertine | GPL,OFL | 2012-07-06 / 5.3.0 | Linux Libertine is a digital typeface created by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create free and open alternatives to proprietary typefaces such as Times Roman. |
| M+ FONTS | OFL | Earlier versions of M+ were released under terms of "unlimited permission."[24] | |
| New Athena Unicode | OFL | 2019-12-08 / 5.007 | |
| Noto fonts | OFL | Commissioned by Google | |
| Old Standard TT | GPL,OFL | 2011-04-30 / 2.2 | A Unicode font family for classical, medieval and Slavic studies; based uponCentury —alternative download at fontspace.com An unofficial extension, New Standard, is available at1001Fonts and includes an expanded character set. |
| Overpass | OFL | Commissioned byRed Hat as FOSS alternative to Interstate. | |
| Oxygen fontsArchived 2020-03-29 at theWayback Machine | GPL + font exception orOFL | Created by theKDE community, this font is optimised for the FreeType font rendering system and works well in all graphical user interfaces, desktops and devices. Alternative download atfontsquirrel.com | |
| Quivira | Public domain | 2019 / 4.1 | 11,053 glyphs, focusing mainly on Western scripts and limited emoji. |
| Roboto | Apache license | 2017-08-03 / 2.138 | A collection of fonts developed for Google'sAndroid mobile phone operating system |
| SIL fonts | OFL | Typefaces include Charis SIL, Doulos SIL and Gentium. | |
| Source Han Sans | OFL | 2019 | ByAdobe |
| Source Han Serif | OFL | 2017 | ByAdobe |
| Source Sans Pro andSource Code Pro | OFL | 2019 | ByAdobe |
| Source Serif Pro | OFL | 2019 | ByAdobe |
| Soyuz Grotesk | No copyright reserved | 2017 | Loosely and indirectly based onHelvetica. Primarily Latin and Cyrillic glyphs. The 2024 revision is under copyright with permission required for derivative works and redistribution. |
| Squarish Sans CT | OFL | 2013 | A clone ofBank Gothic, developed for theAleph One game engine. Focuses mainly on Latin glyphs and some symbols. |
| STIX | OFL | 2019 / 2.0.2 | Based onTimes New Roman. |
| Symbola | No license, "free for any use"[25] | 2021-10 / 14.00[26] | Part of a suite of "Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts" that also included Alexander (an italic Garamond), Anaktoria (grecs du roi), and other specialty fonts. The last updated version of the fonts without anend user license agreement were released in February 2018 (Symbola version 10.24). A restrictive personal-use-only, no-derivative-works, no-redistribution license has been attached to all versions since February 2018 (Symbola version 11). |
| TeX Gyre collection of fonts | GUST licence | ||
| Tuffy | Public domain (PD-self) | 2012-06-14 / 1.28 | Scratch-built sans-serif font by Thatcher Ulrich, with additional contributions fromMichael Everson |
| Ubuntu Font Family | Ubuntu Font License | 2011-03-07 / Ubuntu 11.10 | |
| UniFraktur | OFL | 2017-03-19 |