Typophile

Serif font with a small hyphen?

phatmatt

I'm looking for a free serif font that has a short (low-profile) hyphen. I am creating an open source font for Gregorian chant (http://www.marello.org/projects/caeciliae) and I am interested in recommending other free fonts that would work well for the accompanying text. Some very basic requirements:

  • short hyphen (these come up a lot in the chant text, and smaller = less obtrusive)
  • acute accented æ and œ if possible (in case those don't come out correctly, they're ae and oe ligatures)
  • other standard ligatures would be a great plus

I like Cardo, but wow: it has a long hyphen.

Thanks for any thoughts or recommendations. -B. Matthew

Reed Reibstein

Well, regarding the long hyphen in Cardo, you could horizontally compress its hyphen to the size you want (if that's possible in whatever program you're working in). Since it's just a straight horizontal line in Cardo, there shouldn't be any distortion as there normally is when compressing or expanding glyphs.

A free font that I've heard good things about is Gentium, but I don't know whether its hyphen is any shorter.

Michel Boyer

Here is gentium (words copied from the link you gave)


The ae and oe ligatures are there as well as ae accented.

Michel Boyer

An additional remark: Gentium comes in roman and italics only . You can find (pdf) specimen and proofs at the bottom of this link.

[edit] I mean there is just one weight (there is no bold roman, no bold italics)

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