These are the fonts my inner linguist can’t live without. Many of these are from academic consortiums (consortia) who offer them for free. This avoids the trouble of waiting for the corporate vendors to get around to us linguists (we really aren’t that big a customer base darn it!)
TITUS Cyberbit – Freeware from the University of Frankfurt. This includes characters from many scripts such as Armenian, Cyrillic, Greek, Coptic and more. I find that the characters for each script have been designed for god readability based on traditional forms.
SIL Fonts – Your choices are Charis SIL (a new font designed partially for print), Doulos SIL and Gentium. These include all phonetic symbols and Latin alphabet symbols as wellas Greek and Cyrillic. Additional phonetic symbols are included in the Private Use Area.
Cardo – This one is tied to the Thesaurus Linga Graecae and includes Coptic and unusual variants and rare ancient Greek letters/symbols in the Private Use Area as well as Latin and phonetic letters. I rarely need a digamma, but I’m very happy to have it available.
Aboriginal Sabs Serif – This one includes phonetic stuff and Cherokee and Canadian Aborigonal Syllabics (another script used by several Native American Languages). Oh, and it gets you a sans-serif phonetics font.
Chrysanthi (Chrʃsanþi) – Don’t let the New Age symbols fool you. The Chrysanthi font is actually a nice little addition for your font library containing symbol Unicode blocks which are otherwise hard to find. (FYI – þ = "th" and ſ = "s").
Junicode – Includes characters for medieval languages, Runes and more unusual combined characters and medieval symbols in the Private Use Area.

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