buyhercandy:

piquant:

Gentium is a free/open license font recommended to me by Nick, who’s something of a font connoisseur. It’s beautiful, particularly when printed out (vs. read onscreen), and it’s the same size as Times New Roman so it’s easy to make the switch.

Victor Gaultney designed Gentium for his Masters of Arts in Typeface Design at the University of Reading. His full explanation (pdf) of the design is thorough and intriguing. He used slightly different base shapes for the lowercase c, e, g, o and q, for example, because our eyes tend to read just the tops of letters, so it’s helpful for them to be distinctive. What’s particularly cool about Gentium is that it supports all the letters and diacritics of the “extended Latin” alphabet (proofs (pdf)), so minority language groups previously stuck using Arial Unicode now have an attractive, free font that can actually be used in print.

Oh my god, yes. This is gorgeous. Particularly useful for Vietnamese, for me. Look at all those diacritics!