Hi!
I am currently finishing my biology dissertation in Word. It has 70 pages and I don’t want to use Calibri, Times New Roman or any of the other default fonts which everyone else uses. Can anyone recommend fonts which are free (or cheap) and would work well for longer academic texts.

Hello Emely, 

on the German website typografie.info we have recently defined a list of fonts, which work especially well for dissertations and similar kinds of scientific purpose. Although the text explanations of the list have not been translated to English yet, the plain list of fonts might be already useful for you. Also you can easily see, which fonts we would suggest for combined usage (Minion + Myriad, e. g.). In general the serif font of each suggested couple is meant to be used for body text, the sans serif font for headlines and other short text. 

Click here to get to the list.

If you look for free fonts the couple Linux Libertine and Linux Biolinum might be interesting for you. And maybe you have Minion and Myriad already available on your computer? Then those two would be a good choice as well.  

Adding to Kathrin’s good suggestions, you can peruse these useful lists compiled by Ralf: 

http://typography.guru/list/the-best-free-serif-font-families-r4/ (for text)

http://typography.guru/list/the-best-free-sans-serif-font-families-r5/ (for headings/captions)

 

Edited March 14, 201511 yr by Riccardo Sartori

Good point! :)

With the fonts from Ralf’s lists Emely must just check in advance if those fonts support all the glyphs she needs for her dissertation. Some free fonts are very well designed but limited in the amount of glyphs and the languages they support. 

Thank you very much!

Some of these fonts are otf and some ttf. Do they all work in Word?

Yes, that shouldn’t be a problem. The only thing might be, that Word does not support all the open-type-features, that some of the fonts offer. 

 

Some of these fonts are otf and some ttf. Do they all work in Word?

​If you have a choice: take the .TTFs for office apps. But the regular use (editing, printing) should work with any of the major font formats.