If you are a website developer, you will know how important it is to choose a good-looking and easy-to-read font for the text. Many websites out there use a bad font and give a poor user experience to their visitors. It is therefore important that you use a good web font. If you are a website developer or building your website, you might have already checked some sites to get inspiration. Once you have identified the font, or if you have found a premium font that you want to use, but do not want to spend money on, here is how to find free alternatives to paid Fonts using Alternatype.
Alternatype is a free web app that helps people find out the best possible alternatives to some popular commercial fonts. As it is illegal to use fonts downloaded from some sites, you may use a free alternative to paid fonts. This web tool gets you a download link for the free alternatives on the result screen.
Find free alternatives to paid Fonts
It is straightforward to use the tool, and you do not have to create an account to use it. Head over to the Alternatype.net website and enter a font name. If your desired font is in their database, you can find that in the instant search result. Choose the font from the given list if the font is not listed in the instant search result!
The result page looks like this-
You can get the download link or check a specimen from here.
It is as simple as that. The only problem with this tool is it has a minimal database. You may not find alternatives to some of the latest fonts. However, if your desired font is very modern, there is a high chance of getting the result immediately.
Tools to find similar Fonts
When it comes to finding a free alternative to paid fonts, Alternatype seems to be the only player in this business. However, if you want to find similar fonts – paid or free – you can use the following tools.
1] Identifont
Identifont is a great web app allowing people to find similar fonts to paid commercial ones. Talking about the database, the Identifont database is much more extensive than Alternatype. You can find a minimum of thirty similar font suggestions based on your every query. On the other hand, using this tool is pretty easy as well.
Visit the Identifont website, enter your font name, and press the Enter button. You should find some similar font suggestions on your left-hand side. This list should contain paid as well as free font suggestions.
2] FontSquirrel Matcherator
It is another excellent tool to find the exact or similar font based on your image text. In other words, you need to upload an image containing your desired font. The FontSquirrel Matcherator will do background checks and let you find the font you want to download or buy.
Go to the FontSquirrel website, upload your image, select the text, and click on Matcherate it button. You will get all the similar font suggestions right away.
Related read: Free Fonts download for logos and commercial use.
How can I identify a font in a PDF?
Open the PDF file with Acrobat Reader. From the File menu, select “Properties” or press “Ctrl-D”. You can find the fonts embedded in the PDF by clicking the “Fonts” tab in the Document Properties window that appears.
What are copy-paste fonts?
The Copy and Paste fonts are a collection of Unicode characters or symbols that resemble the alphabet or its variations. As the name suggests, the website algorithm converts your normal text to symbols resembling Unicode symbols that can be pasted anywhere by simply copying and pasting.
