Bitter: A Free Font for Reading Online

Bitter is a free, open source front designed for easy reading online. It's a slab serif font with a high x-height. It should be quite legible on a phone or ereader.

People read and interact with text on screens more and more each day. What happens on screen ends up being more important than what comes out of the printer. With the accelerating popularity of electronic books, type designers are working hard to seek out the ideal designs for reading on screen.

Motivated by my love for the pixel I designed Bitter. A “contemporary” slab serif typeface for text, it is specially designed for comfortably reading on any computer or device. The robust design started from the austerity of the pixel grid, based on rational rather than emotional principles. It combines the large x-heights and legibility of the humanistic tradition with subtle characteristics in the characters that inject a certain rhythm to flowing texts.

Bitter has little variation in stroke weight and the Regular is thicker than a normal ‘Regular’ style for print design. This generates an intense color in paragraphs, accentuated by the serifs that are as thick as strokes with square terminals.

I copied the font to my Kindle and I like it. Note that the book must support custom fonts, and not all do, in which case the Kindle will revert to your previous default font.

Thanks to Robert J. Sawyer for the tip.