this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2026
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And what disadvantages? Like pricing or licensing terms?

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[–] jqubed@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago

Designers would tell you the quality is typically better on a professionally designed and commercially sold/licensed font, although there have been some excellent FOSS fonts in recent years, usually because of someone paying professionals to put the same effort into the font but then releasing it under a Free or Open license. The drawback of commercial fonts is mainly cost, especially for some popular fonts. The cost can vary depending on your intended use, such as one price for print material, a different price for web use or app use, and online uses might even be licensed for how many visitors a site has. Like, a license might only cover 100,000 visitors per month.

And as others have mentioned, Google Fonts as a service is “free” but as with many Google offerings comes at the cost of additional Google tracking. They’re mainly using Free/Open fonts so they don’t have to pay licensing fees, not really out of support for free software. They have a lot of offerings that are mediocre ripoffs of commercial fonts.

Butterick’s Practical Typography has a few recommendations on Free/Open fonts. The whole “book” is something I recommend reading to anyone who has even a passing interest in making their written work look more professional.