Free Font Resource with many Gothic and Calligraphic Fonts
As I’m working on my maps I often find myself looking for the right font. After a while you get tired of Papyrus and Old English–the two most common fantasy-ish fonts (for lack of a better term.) Over the past couple of weeks I focused on finding more that have a fantasy look to them. To me that is something Gothic or Calligraphic.
I found a great site that hosts the work of a font-maker Dieter Steffman. (It is in German so try a website translator to sort of read it.) If I’m reading his site correctly (and erring on the side of caution) he is declaring his fonts free for non-commercial use. His site links to another site hosting a few hundred of his fonts. Unfortunately it doesn’t show samples on one page so you need to click each font name if it seems interesting and that shows a preview page. My favorites for fantasy are Devinne swash, Gabrielle, Roland, Romantik Initialin. For westerns, try Billboard, Old Town or Billboard. For science fiction look for the cleaner fonts or if you want something different try Starburst.
Another site that shows Dieter Steffman’s fonts and many other free fonts is dafont.com. However, since they miscategorized Steffman’s fonts as simply “free” you should be wary and doublecheck the copyright status of any font you wish to use. (Just above each download link they summarize the distribution status as “Free for personal use” or “Donationware” or simply “Free” etc.)
To install a new font on your computer, do a web search for your computer’s operating system name and “how to install a font” or something like that.
What other free font resources do you know about? Which fonts are your favorites for fantasy or science fiction or western maps and handouts?
If you aren’t going to try sell the fonts, and you live in the US, the license shouldn’t be a concern. Copyright only subsists in the font files themselves (i.e. the program code), not the glyphs, so if you just use the characters and do not distribute the fonts in violation of the license, you should be fine. IANACL, though.
He writes: “Aus all diesen Gründen stelle ich meine Schriften jedermann für nichtprofessionelle Zwecke kostenlos ohne irgendwelche Einschränkungen zur Verfügung und hoffe, dass Sie sich an diesen Schriften genau so erfreuen wie ich und viele andere Schriftfreunde in aller Welt!”
This translates to “For all these reasons I’m making my fonts available for non-commercial use by anybody and without any other restrictions of any kind; and I hope you’ll enjoy these fonts just as much as I and many other font-lovers in the whole world do.”
Thanks Jay & Alex:
I just don’t understand if “non-commercial use” for fonts means that you simply can’t re-sell the fonts themselves or if it means you can’t use the font in a product you sell.
I think in legal terms, “non-commercial use” is ill-defined. I’m not a lawyer, just interested in licensing and copyright. I’ve never thought about fonts in particular before, and I don’t really agree with Jay’s statement. Then again, I live in Switzerland. 🙂
But first the basics as I understand them: If you use a font in your product, then your work becomes a derivative of the font: it wouldn’t be the same without the font! This is the strictest interpretation. Thus, the copyright holder of the font shares authorship. He only allows you to use it non-commercially, therefore your product can only be used non-commercially.
Back to the definition of non-commercial. There is actually a blog entry for the Creative Commons definition of Non-Commercial:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/17127
My strictest interpretation, again, is that making the product available from a site that makes money from ads is commercial use. Whether the money made is profit or not, doesn’t matter.
That’s why I try to avoid the non-commercial clause myself. There are no ads on my site, so I don’t feel to bad, but practically all other public sites involve ads in some form to cover their bandwidth.
But as they say in the blog post: “See much more in the study report and draw your own conclusions from the data.” 🙂
Yikes!!
I’d interpret “non-commercial USE” as using the font in a product, as opposed to “non-commerical distribution” or somesuch.