Font Services Review

Font companies provide unique, custom or licensed typefaces. Font services not only supply fonts for books or printed materials, but also licensed fonts for logos or product labeling and digitized fonts for cell phones, games, websites, software or other electronic, digital mediums.

Most font providers offer many useful and specialized services, such as:

• Font Conversions - Conversion of one format to another, such as Postscript to TrueType.
• Non-Latin Fonts - Special characters or full font sets for Non-Latin languages, Arabic or CE characters.
• Digitization of Artwork - The transferring of existing artwork or scanned fonts into a digitized format.
• Custom Typefaces - The creation of a font for a specific purpose, such as for corporate use, magazine or website publishing or for branding, logos, symbols or labeling. Some providers can develop fonts from handwriting as well.
• Specialized Character Creation - Often this service is used for the creation of specialized characters for corporate use or language conversions.

In this site, we offer reviews of the top ten font providers. You will also find articles and recent news stories relating to the font industry to help you make an informed decision on which provider is best for you. At TopTenREVIEWS We Do the Research So You Don't Have To.™

What to Look for in a Font Service

Ultimately, the best service for a particular project is the one that can provide the desired font in the required format. Similar to stock photography, several services may be used regularly depending on what is needed. Some font services offer English language fonts at a reasonable price and may be a good option for some projects, whereas other sites may offer non-Latin, Arabic or CE characters. For branding, logos or company symbols, a specialized font provider can be consulted and licensing options evaluated.

To assist in finding just the right font provider for a project, we evaluated the top ten services in the industry. Below are the criteria that TopTenREVIEWS used to evaluate online font services:

Ease of Use
Evaluates how easy it is to find relevant information on the website such as font searches, specials, articles, contact/support information and format options. Once a font search is completed, it is also helpful if the service displays the formats available with the download price and package alternatives.

Feature Set
Assesses the features the service offers such as free fonts, font packages and CDs, licensing options, special services and the languages and formats available. A good service offers fonts in TrueType, OpenType and PostScript and an exceptional service offers Unicode compliant fonts and non-Latin characters as well.

Ease of Download
This criterion evaluates the download process. Good font services should provide error-free downloads and you should be able to view and use the acquired fonts without problems.

Available Tools
Font management, creation and conversion tools are valuable tools to offer clients; this section relates what tools, both purchasable and free, a particular service offers.

Help/Support
We looked at the customer/technical support aspects of the company and the available contact methods. The best services offer toll-free telephone and email support and respond to inquiries quickly. We also considered the additional sources of information such as discussion forums, FAQ/help pages, articles, magazines or newsletters. 

To begin your search for the perfect font provider for your project, consult the matrix above. Read the review of our #1 font service, Fonts.com for general font services, ITC for classic quality fonts and Linotype for non-Latin characters.