The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
New York vs DejaVu Serif
Two screen-era serifs built for very different worlds. New York is Apple's transitional companion to San Francisco, with four optical sizes and six weights per size, released to developers in 2019 but licensed only for software on Apple platforms. DejaVu Serif is the open-source expansion of Bitstream Vera Serif, started in 2004 by Štěpán Roh and shipped by default on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and RHEL.
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 → DejaVu Serif is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Bitter, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to DejaVu Serif →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- New York ships in four optical sizes (Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large) with six weights each, so it shifts from a reading face at text sizes to a display face at large sizes.
- DejaVu Serif comes in just Book, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic, plus an experimental Condensed set, with no optical sizing or light and heavy extremes.
- DejaVu Serif inherits Vera's full TrueType hinting and covers Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian and large symbol ranges, far beyond New York's Latin, Greek and Cyrillic.
- New York is free to download but its Apple license restricts it to designing and developing software for Apple platforms, so it cannot legally be used on websites, print or non-Apple apps, which is the real licensing cost here.
- DejaVu Serif uses the Bitstream Vera license, an MIT-style license close to the SIL OFL, so it can be embedded, modified and redistributed anywhere, with DejaVu's own changes in the public domain.
New York
Reach for New York when you are building for iOS, iPadOS or macOS and want a native-feeling editorial serif whose optical sizes scale from body copy to headlines.
DejaVu Serif
Reach for DejaVu Serif for cross-platform documents, Linux systems and multilingual text, where its unrestricted license and wide Unicode coverage matter more than refinement.