There is a vast volume of free/shareware fonts floating around, in all styles, and levels of quality.

I was thinking that something like Napster for fonts could be a good idea. Fonts could be catalogued according to style (i.e., geometric, blackletter, script), weight, width and various descriptive keywords. That way, if you decide you want a high-tech yet curvy, wide, bold font for your new web site, you fire up Fontster, enter these arguments (as well as a few optional keywords, such as, perhaps, "techno" or "organic") and search for any matches. Matches could even be sent with a highly-compressed sample, saving you from having to download the whole font to see if you want it.
-- acb, May 31 2001

Although it sounds like a good idea, there's so many really cheap CDs of fonts around that I'm not sure it would take off. I may well be totally wrong. Gets a pastry anyway.
-- angel, May 31 2001


"Typeface as typeface" is not protected by copyright in the United States.
-- bookworm, May 31 2001


I may be missing something here. Aren't there a lot of sites which offer free download of hundreds of fonts and font packages, with descriptions and/or samples on view?
-- Dog Ed, May 31 2001


sorry, really really annoying thing for me here...... why fontster? i mean Napster (i'd imagine your source of name) is about music swapping not Nap (i dunno) swapping. why not something ambiguous so that if the fonts sharing failed you could use the same software + server for something else.
-- dekoi, May 31 2001


I would like to see this happen just for the "Eminem vs. Bodoni" and "Britney Spears vs. Futura" monstrosities it will spawn. But since I used to make a living designing fonts, which is by no means a profitable business, I'll have to say it shouldn't. (Not being a record company exec or musician, I have no problem with Napster.)
-- ejs, Jun 01 2001


A centralized site with a well-maintained font search engine and samples of fonts (and maybe an ad-hoc typesetting service that returns a .PNG, given a text, font, and colors) would be a good idea. Something like "freshmeat" for fonts.

A decentralized Peer-To-Peer file swapping service as a specialization of gnutella would offer none of these things. There is nothing about this problem that requires peer-to-peer, either. There is no huge throughput; unlike music or informational texts, fonts are downloaded once, and used locally many times over.
-- jutta, Jun 01 2001


I think "Freshmeat for fonts" sites do exist, though I don't think any of them are quite as well-done as one might like.

When people say "foo-ster", they usually seem to mean "something magic which gives me lots of foo for free". Pthbb.
-- egnor, Jun 01 2001


I like. Croissants all around.
-- jetgrrl, Jun 07 2001



random, halfbakery