I gave up on this list of "free" fonts after the first four were:

* Non-commercial use only

* Not able to be shared

* Actually costs money

* No-derivatives, which would seem to prevent actually using the font at all.

High quality free fonts:

- http://www.studiopress.com/design/google-font-combinations.h...

- http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/03/12/taking-a-second-l...

- http://www.exljbris.com/

- http://jamiewilson.io/norwester/

https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/ also open source

I gave up because I seem to be unable to find the actual link to the "free download."

So, to download the few of these that I like, I either have to login with FB and allow access to all my friends, or use Twitter and allow the font owner to post tweets to my account. Sorry, but that's not exactly what most people expect when they read "free fonts."

There is so much crap like this on the internet that I use Multifox to simultaneously stay logged in to my personal fb/twitter and my fake fb/twitter for crap like this.

http://br.mozdev.org/multifox/

It's only 1 additional step of 'open in new identity profile' then these people can access my precious fake emails and non-existent friend lists :)

Brilliant!

Why is it so hard to provide a nice sample sheet for fonts? Just a paragraph (or just a sentence for display fonts) in the various weights would be a huge step forward in most cases.

Just compare the samples of Hallo Sans (the first font in this list): https://www.behance.net/gallery/Hallo-Sans-Free-typeface/132...

To that of The Enschede Font Foundry's Trinité: http://www.teff.nl/fonts/trinite/pdf/trinite_a3_print-600.pd...

None of these fonts are SIL. So why is this on the HN front page?

SIL is just one of many open source licenses, and they said 'free', not 'open-source'.

I think it's on the front page because many people may be interested in modern type trends and at the very least this is an excellent collection of ideas to look at. If you want to download one for free you can too!