The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
New York vs Bitstream Vera Serif
Two serifs built with screens in mind, from very different eras. New York is Apple's 2019 transitional serif companion to San Francisco, cut in four optical sizes and six weights, while Bitstream Vera Serif is Jim Lyles's 2003 open-licensed text face, hinted for low-resolution displays and shipped in just Roman and Bold.
New York is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Source Serif 4, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to New York → Bitstream Vera Serif is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Bitter, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Bitstream Vera Serif →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- New York is a transitional serif that ships in four optical sizes (Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large) with six weights each, plus lining and text figures in proportional and tabular widths.
- Bitstream Vera Serif comes in only two styles, Roman and Bold, with no true italic, and covers roughly 300 glyphs across Basic Latin and Latin-1.
- Vera Serif is a fully hinted TrueType font designed to render crisply on low-resolution screens, and it later became the base for the much larger DejaVu Serif family.
- New York covers Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, whereas Vera Serif stops at Western European Latin.
- Licensing is the real divide: Apple distributes New York free of charge but solely for designing and developing software on Apple platforms, while Vera Serif's Bitstream license allows derivatives and redistribution, barring only standalone resale.
New York
Reach for New York when you are designing an iOS or macOS app and want a reading serif that scales from body text to display within Apple's own type system.
Bitstream Vera Serif
Reach for Bitstream Vera Serif when you need a free, redistributable text serif for Linux desktops, documents, or embedded software where a Roman and Bold pair is enough.