Freely available old-style serif fonts with multiple weights

Question

When I typeset text, I love to be able to choose from a large array of different weights (and, if possible, expansions). Having light and semi-bold variants in addition to the regular and bold weights really help broaden one's choices for setting type elegantly. For long-running text, I am quite partial to old-style serifs, and to Arno Pro and Minion Pro in particular.

However, those two are commercial fonts. I am thus looking for a good set of free old-style serif fonts including three or four weights. (Free as is free beer or free speech, I'm trying not to set the bar too high!).

Answer 1

Some other sources of free (and sometimes good) fonts:

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/ and http://www.searchfreefonts.com/

Few examples: ALEGREYA, CARDO, CAUDEX, CRIMSON ...

Answer 2

Metafont is Donald Knuth's font description language supporting obscene numbers of parameters, including multiple weights ("asking an artist to become enough of a mathematician to understand how to write a font with 60 parameters is too much"). The most-widely-used Metafont font is Computer Modern, which, unsurprisingly, is Modern rather than old-style.

However, there are apparently some old-style Metafont fonts available. Looking through one old list (1997), I see one called Pandora described as "a little like Palatino", which is old-style. More information on this font: CTAN, LaTeX font catalogue.

See also http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/fonts/metafont.html, which lists some Metafont fonts, and the LaTeX font catalogue list of fonts (most probably not Metafont).

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Gentium is definitely old-style, and its Gentium Basic variant comes in 4 weights (regular, book, bold, book bold), where the Book weights are slightly heavier:

The Basic fonts have a reduced character repertoire, but the project plans to support book weights for the entire font:

The main Gentium family will eventually have a complete matching Book weight, along with matching italics.

Our next major effort is completing bold and bold italic weights of Gentium Plus alongside a new Gentium Book Plus family. These new weights are currently available for Gentium Basic/Gentium Book Basic.")

Answer 3

DaFont.com has many free fonts, and will list by category. For example, all the serif fonts are at:

http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=502

From there, you can list only the free ones by clicking "more options" in the bar between "Basic>Serif" and the actual fonts, and checking the appropriate boxes.

Answer 4

Check out Merriweather on Google's webfonts. It is not strictly "old style" in the Venetian/Garalde tradition but I think it will do what you're after.

Obviously, you can use it for web, but you can also download for comps and print work. It is not a thoroughly programmed OpenType font like you would expect when handing over cash but you're not handing over cash.

For the price, you will not find a finer piece of type design.