Open-source Unicode typefaces
There are Unicode typefaces which are open-source and designed to contain glyphs of all Unicode characters, or at least a broad selection of Unicode scripts. There are also numerous projects aimed at providing only a certain script, such as the Arabeyes Arabic font. The advantage of targeting only some scripts with a font 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 as OpenType can in theory cover multiple languages by including multiple glyphs per character, though very few actually cover more than one language's forms of the unified Han characters.
History
20th century
Fixed
The Fixed X11 public-domain core bitmap fonts have provided substantial Unicode coverage since 1997.GNU Unifont
GNU Unifont is a bitmap-based font created by Roman Czyborra that is present in most free operating systems and windowing systems such as Linux, XFree86 or the X.Org Server. The font is released under the GNU General Public License Version 2+ with a font embedding exception.21st century
2000s
Free UCS Outline Fonts
The Free UCS Outline Fonts 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 as GNU FreeFont under the GNU General Public License. It also supports several font formats, including PostScript, TrueType, and OpenType. For this reason the fonts are derived from original work made in FontForge, and stored in.sfd files. The most recent release is from May 2012.SIL fonts
offers a large number of fonts, editors, translation and book production systems as part of their goal to bridge the digital 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 own SIL Open Font License. Typefaces include Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, Gentium and Andika.
MPH 2B Damase
Mark Williamson's MPH 2B Damase is a free font encoding many non-Latin scripts, including the Unicode 4.1 scripts in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane:Armenian, Cherokee, Coptic, Cypriot Syllabary, Cyrillic, Deseret, Georgian, Glagolitic, Gothic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Limbu, Linear B, Old Italic, Old Persian cuneiform, Osmanya, Phoenician, Shavian, Syloti Nagri, Tai Le, Thaana, Tifinagh, Ugaritic, and Vietnamese.
IndUni fonts
The IndUni fonts are a GPL-licensed font family with many accents and combining characters, especially suitable for Indic, Indian and Nepali 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 by URW++ Design and Development Incorporated, and offer lookalikes for Courier, Helvetica, Times, Palatino, and New Century Schoolbook.
2010s
Noto fonts
Noto is a font family designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard. It is designed with the goal of achieving visual harmony across multiple languages/scripts. Commissioned by Google, the font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License. Until September 2015, the fonts were under the Apache License 2.0.Cascadia Code
Cascadia Code is a purpose-built TrueType font for Windows Terminal, the new command-line interface for Microsoft Windows. It includes programming ligatures and was designed to enhance the look and feel of Windows Terminal, terminal applications and text editors such as Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. The font is open source under the SIL Open Font License and available on GitHub. It has been bundled with Windows Terminal since version 0.5.2762.0.2020s
Kurinto Font Folio
Kurinto is a large collection of Pan-Unicode, OFL-licensed TrueType fonts. The intended use-case is academic publishing, especially when authoring in Microsoft Word and publishing to PDF. The primary goal is to address issues when mixing languages using Latin script with secondary languages using other scripts. Most of the italic faces are not true italics; they are slanted versions of the corresponding regular ones. However, those of the included "Metric-Compatible Typeface" serifs are.Larabie Fonts
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. 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 the Canadian sesquicentennial in 2017.
Comparison
| Font name | License | Notes | |
| Amiri Font | OFL | 2020-06-02 / 0.113 | Digitalization of a Naskh styled Arabic metal typeface by the Bulaq Press of Cairo, Egypt |
| Public domain | 2013-04-20 | Designed with the symbols needed for programming with the APL programming language. Contains three fonts, APL385, APL2741 and APL333. | |
| Arphic Public License | 2024-03-15 / 15.1.4 | A unicode CJK font with over 41,000 Han characters, and over 53,000 unicode characters currently. | |
| Bitstream Vera | 2003-04-16 / 1.10 | ||
| Public domain | 2017-06-19 / 1.100 | Created by Ray Larabie for the Canadian sesquicentennial; released into the public domain shortly before Canada Day 2017. A pan-Unicode extension of Larabie's "Mesmerize", in turn inspired by Kabel and Semplicità. | |
| OFL | 2011-04-20 / 1.04 | Unicode 6 and MUFI v3-compatible | |
| collection | OFL | 2020-09-06 / 2.2 | A collection of fonts designed for Cyrillic and Glagolitic scripts used for the Church Slavonic liturgical language. |
| CMU family | OFL | 2012-08-29 / 0.7.0 | An updated version of Computer Modern. |
| 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 | / | A modification and wide extension of Bitstream Vera fonts | |
| Droid fonts | Apache license | 2007 | A collection of fonts developed for Google's Android mobile phone operating system |
| EB Garamond | OFL | 2011 | |
| MIT | 2016-07-08 | ||
| Fira Sans | OFL | 2018-03-20 / 4.3 | Commissioned for Firefox 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 on Fixedsys. |
| Gentium | OFL or BSD-like license | 2014-10-28 / 5.000 | |
| Ghostscript | GPL, AFPL, LPPL | 2020-03-19 / 9.52 | URW ++ Type 1 fonts, a free alternatives to 35 basic PostScript fonts—e.g. Type 1 version of Nimbus Roman No9 L, Nimbus Sans L, Nimbus Mono L, URW Bookman L, URW Gothic L and others |
| GNU Unifont | GPL-2.0-or-later with Font-exception-2.0 | / | GNU Unifont is a bitmap-based font created by Roman Czyborra that is present in most free operating systems. |
| 2017-09-04 | One of the few free software fonts that includes the whole CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C block, as well as many other CJKV characters, such as the Kangxi Radicals and CJK Radicals Supplement blocks. | ||
| OFL | 2017-02-06 / 2.29 RC2 | Loosely based on Spartan. The most recent 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 | |
| OFL, free for any use | 2016-04-18 | Most Latin blocks fully populated + Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian & Runes. Comes in Roman, Italic, Bold & Bold Italic. | |
| OFL | 2020-07-26 / 2.196 | Pan-Unicode, 21 typefaces, 506 fonts, coverage of most of Unicode v12.1 plus many auxiliary scripts including the UCSUR. | |
| Latin Modern | Another derivative of Computer Modern | ||
| Lato | OFL | 2015-08-06 / 2.015 | Covers all Latin alphabets, along with Cyrillic, Greek, and IPA |
| GPL + font exception | Is a derivative of Liberation fonts with improved Cyrillic | ||
| 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. 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." | |
| OFL | 2019-12-08 / 5.007 | ||
| Noto fonts | OFL | Commissioned by Google | |
| GPL, OFL | 2011-04-30 / 2.2 | A Unicode font family for classical, medieval and Slavic studies; based upon Century — An unofficial extension, New Standard, is available at and includes an expanded character set. | |
| Overpass | OFL | Commissioned by Red Hat as FOSS alternative to Interstate. | |
| GPL + font exception or OFL | Created by the KDE community, this font is optimised for the FreeType font rendering system and works well in all graphical user interfaces, desktops and devices. Alternative download at | ||
| 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's Android mobile phone operating system |
| SIL fonts | OFL | Typefaces include Charis SIL, Doulos SIL and Gentium. | |
| Source Han Sans | OFL | 2019 | By Adobe |
| Source Han Serif | OFL | 2017 | By Adobe |
| Source Sans Pro and Source Code Pro | OFL | 2019 | By Adobe |
| Source Serif Pro | OFL | 2019 | By Adobe |
| No copyright reserved | 2017 | Loosely and indirectly based on Helvetica. Primarily Latin and Cyrillic glyphs. The 2024 revision is under copyright with permission required for derivative works and redistribution. | |
| OFL | 2013 | A clone of Bank Gothic, developed for the Aleph One game engine. Focuses mainly on Latin glyphs and some symbols. | |
| STIX | OFL | 2019 / 2.0.2 | Based on Times New Roman. |
| Symbola | No license, "free for any use" | 2021-10 / 14.00 | Part of a suite of "Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts" that also included Alexander, Anaktoria, and other specialty fonts. The last updated version of the fonts without an end user license agreement were released in February 2018. A restrictive personal-use-only, no-derivative-works, no-redistribution license has been attached to all versions since February 2018. |
| collection of fonts | |||
| Public domain | 2012-06-14 / 1.28 | Scratch-built sans-serif font by Thatcher Ulrich, with additional contributions from Michael Everson | |
| Ubuntu Font Family | Ubuntu Font License | 2011-03-07 / Ubuntu 11.10 | |
| OFL | 2017-03-19 |