Day Roman is free, classic and legible

http://x1brettstuff.blogspot.com/2006/10/more-free-typefaces.html

I've been in this situation many of times too...

Gentium is probably the best free font in the world (won a TDC award). Its good for text and very beautiful. Looks a little like ITC Gamma too just with the eccentricities. The PDF's on the Sil website prove that Gentium is not generic free 'stuff'.

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium

Also fontshop offers a free font of the month (or when ever new type is available). You can actually build a little library out of these fonts.

http://www.fontshop.com/features/free.cfm

But I must tell you need to invest in commercial type.

Now if you want a mind blowing value that no one can beat- Font Diner! Just about all of these fonts are for display but they work well with each other and with neutral classics like Futura and or Franklin Gothic that maybe installed on your machine.
The collections are only 28 dollars each!!! Sometimes you can't even buy ONE font for that price! Downside- not opentype.

http://www.fontdiner.com/main.html

Also have a look at Fonts.com
Zapfino Extra Pro and Forte Pro could be had for only 35.00 and these come loaded with every feature in the book.
PNM Caecilia has integrated the small caps, ligatures, old style figures in one font file- actually saving you money when you buy as OpenType 29.00- not bad. And a range weights that you are looking for.

And Ascendercorp.com has a fabulous collection of original fonts (oft under-appreciated)
Ascender does lots of business with Microsoft and other OEMs hence these are expertly hinted- you have to pay big bucks for fonts that are hinted- and price are still very good.

http://www.ascendercorp.com/Ascender_fonts.html

http://www.ascendercorp.com/pdf/Ascender_WPF_fonts.pdf

Endurnace Pro, Kootenay Pro, Lindsey Pro, Massif Pro (has a similiar stroke modulation of the expensive Font Bureau Amira), etc. Pescadero is very special- no italic though.

You might also want to consider font collections:

FB Eagle, Coquette, and Columbus make the whole $19.00 collection worth it.

http://ascenderfonts.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code...

Adobe collections are really the ultimate though. They cost more but this is really the creme de la creme!

http://www.adobe.com/type/collections.html

Hope I have helped you. Don't forget to ask about student discounts if you are one.

Mike Diaz :-)

Mike,

Thanks so much for all the information. This is going to help quite a bit. I know I need to build my commercial font library, but the catch is that I want to purchase fonts I can use for a mac instead of PC which happens to be the only system I have for freelance at home right now. Which is part of the reason I am not doing much freelance on my own yet. I'm not a student so that student discount might not help, except my boyfriend is still a student...hmmm.

So, yeah. The plan is to buy a mac soon, then get CS2 up and running from home. I use the new versions at work, so I am up-to-date, just not at home. I didn't want to upgrade on my PC because I know I'm getting a mac and will have to purchase the software then.

But, again. Thanks for all the links.I'm going to look into all these and see if any will work for this project.

typographia>>> OpenType fonts work on the mac and the PC. They have special features such as glyph substitution ( such as f-ligatures ff, fi, fj, ffl, fl) Just about all the fonts I suggested with the exception of the Font Diner choices are OpenType.

OpenType is cross-platform. If all that is available to you is a windows machine- go right ahead- then when you get your mac you can use those same fonts and they will function just as well if not better (on the mac its very easy to work with OpenType and all it features)

http://www.adobe.com/type/opentype/

But just remember the fonts on your boyfriends machine have to be uninstalled if he does not live you... I know that's dumb but that's how font licenses go.

All the success to you,

Mike Diaz :-)