I am currently creating a documentation for UnifrakturMaguntia, a font on which I worked in the last years in my freetime. This documentation will be rendered in two versions, one that is primarily set in blackletter and one that is primarily set in a roman font. In particular for the latter, I need a matching roman font.
This roman font must:
- look good alongside UnifrakturMaguntia, in particular when used in the same line (see examples below). In particular, neither font should be overly prominent when immersed in the other due to having more or less type colour or strongly different proportions;
- be suitable for screen rendering, so most likely a sans serif or slab serif;
- be free, so others can build upon my work without having to purchase a font;
- contain the characters Ä, Ö, Ü, ä, ö, ü, ß und ſ (long s);¹
have at least two of the following:
- an italic or slanted style (or be passable in faux italics);
- a bold style (or, if the matching style is already bold: have an even bolder style);
- small caps
It would be nice if the font also:
- has a monospace variant;
- contains », «, –, ’ and an appropriate narrow space;¹
- supports most characters from Latin-1 Supplement and Latin Extended A;
- supports Greek.
¹ An alternative would be if the font is designed and licensed such that I can easily add these characters myself.
I browsed Fontsquirrrel and some other resources and the biggest problem with most fonts matching the hard criteria was that they had no matching proportions or clearly had less colour (but of course I may have missed or misjudged some fonts). My favourite choice so far is Yanone Kaffesatz, which I use in the following examples but which almost fails criterion 5 and fails or partially fails criteria 6 to 9. Also it is somewhat too narrow for my taste. (Still, I do not consider it a bad choice given my constraints.)
To give you a rough idea how things are going to look like, here are two examples with Yanone Kaffeesatz (click the images for full resolution):
(I am aware that there are some unresolved issues with these examples, which I am going to tackle when I will have decided upon the font.)