The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Minion Pro vs Minion 3
Two generations of the same Adobe Originals text serif, both by Robert Slimbach. Minion Pro is the 2000 OpenType release of a 1990 Renaissance-inspired old-style design, with 64 styles across four optical sizes, two widths, and four weights. Minion 3, released in 2018, re-examines that design with redrawn optical sizes and much wider script coverage, but drops the condensed widths.
Minion Pro is a commercial font, so it is shown here in EB Garamond, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Minion Pro → Minion 3 is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Crimson Pro, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Minion 3 →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- Minion Pro ships 64 styles including Regular and Condensed widths, while Minion 3 has 32 styles with four weights and four optical sizes but no condensed cut.
- Minion 3 nearly doubles the Latin character set, adding African-language support, Vietnamese, full IPA, and a new Armenian script, with refined Greek and Cyrillic.
- Both families offer Caption, Text, Subhead, and Display optical sizes, but Minion 3's were rebuilt from six masters rather than interpolated between the original 6-point and 72-point extremes.
- Minion Pro turns on the Th ligature by default, whereas Minion 3 only applies it when discretionary ligatures are enabled, so documents can reflow if you swap one for the other.
- Both are commercial fonts available through an Adobe Fonts subscription, with perpetual licenses sold separately, so licensing cost is a factor either way.
Minion Pro
Reach for Minion Pro when you need the condensed widths, have existing documents set in it, or want the long-proven default that many Adobe workflows already assume.
Minion 3
Reach for Minion 3 for new multilingual or scholarly projects that need IPA, Armenian, Vietnamese, or refined Greek and Cyrillic, with the most current optical-size drawing.