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My Favourite Fonts

I'm writing this for three main reasons:

In case you also like these fonts but haven't heard of/seen them before.
In the hope that you'll reply with your own favourites (and I can maybe discover some new favourites as a result).
So I can come back to this in a few years, when my tastes have inevitably changed (or I've just got bored of these), to remind me of what I used to use.

I'm not a font/typeface designer and I don't really know much about the specific terminology or technology behind fonts, this page is just a short list of my personal favourites in each category. I also generally don't worry too much about font licenses when downloading them for personal use - if I can find a free download from a relatively legitimate-looking website, I'm happy to use it. Please do your research before using any of these fonts for anything public and/or commercial! I'm working on the basis that the sample images I've created count as 'fair use'.

Serif

I don't often use serif fonts, except for reading longer text (e.g. eBooks or web pages in 'reader mode'). When I eventually get round to making my own Gemini client (or when Lagrange allows the use of arbitrary fonts), I'll almost certainly use this font for the main body text of Gemini pages.

Bookerly

Sample image

Download page (the page talks mostly about Amazon's 'Ember' font, but the download zip includes Bookerly)

Sans Serif

I don't have especially strong opinions on sans serif fonts for reading text, these fonts are chosen primarily for use as UI fonts in an operating system.

My current pick: SF Compact Text Semibold

This font has a very large array of different weights, I prefer Semibold for UI elements.

Sample image

Download (in Mac dmg format, non-Mac users should be able to extract with programs like 7zip)

Runners up

GE Inspira

Sample image

Unofficial download (the font is only licensed for use by employees of General Electric)

Ubuntu

Sample image

Download

Monospace

I'm a programmer and frequent terminal-user, so this is the category I have the strongest opinions on and the largest list of favourites.

My current pick: APL385 Unicode

This font automatically switches off anti-aliasing below a certain size, so there's two sample images here (for some reason, libreoffice has anti-aliased the 8pt line in the first image - even though it doesn't when rendering in the document itself).

Sample image

Sample image (larger minimum size)

Download

Runners up

San Francisco Mono ("SF Mono")

Sample image

Official download (in Mac dmg format)

Unofficial download (in otf format)

Consolas

Sample image

Unofficial download (Windows users probably have this installed already)

Ubuntu Mono

Monofur

Annoyingly, the bullet point symbol (also sometimes used for password entry) in this font is a weird paw-print icon. For a while I had my own custom modified version (with a normal bullet point and no other changes), but I seem to have lost it during an OS move at some point.

How I generated the sample images

I didn't know you could do this with libreoffice, so sharing it here:

soffice --convert-to png ~/Documents/FontTest.odt
mogrify -trim -bordercolor "#FFF" -border 20 +repage FontTest.png

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/138804/how-to-transform-a-text-file-into-a-picture

My version of FontTest.odt

2021-10-24 Update

I noticed some of the images weren't correctly showing bold/bold-italics, they should all be correct now.