I was looking for Latin-Greek-Cyrillic (LGC) serif typeface for a chemistry course which takes place on olunet. There are a lot of free fonts. Only few of them are easily readable from screen, simply elegant, and contain reqired UTF characters.
Firstly, a css3 @font-face property test was made on fonts.olunet.org in order to compare different typeface candidates. Namely, DejaVu, FreeFont, Libertine, Liberation ans STIX were compared to Times New Roman.
DejaVu looks wide on Windows. Thus, it was narrowed. STIX and FreeFont seem to be very nice, but both are hardly readable from screen. Liberation and DejaVu are bit prim. Libertine is good – it looks lightweight, readable, and elegant. The slope in italic variant is pleasant. I do like some characters of Libertine very much, for example “k”, “p” and “z”. However, Libertine is really heavy font weighting approximately 1 Mb.
| Name | Vesrion or date | Font format | Reg. var. |
| DejaVuSerif | 2.29 | ttf | 321 kb |
| FreeSerif | 09.01.04 | otf | 1.86 Mb |
| Liberation Regular | 1.05 | ttf | 149 kb |
| Libertine Regular | 4.4.1 | otf | 1.04 Mb |
| STIXGeneral | beta | ttf* | 325 kb |
* I was not able to get otf format files for STIX font work properly, thus ttf version was used.
Second test was aimed to compare different fonts for mathematical equations. Mathematical Browser Test was taken as a basis. I must warn, that the approach presented is not ideal. STIX font installed gives better result, than when it is downloaded via css3 font-face property. On the whole, this test demonstrates how this property may be used successfully.
NB! This post is a draft, which would be rewritten sometime later.