The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Free font
PT Serif
A free alternative to Georgia.
About PT Serif
PT Serif is ParaType's 2010 transitional workhorse, a robust text serif engineered for low-resolution legibility with extensive Cyrillic coverage. It has humanist terminals, sturdy strokes, a generous x-height, and restrained contrast, with a compact, economical fit that holds up at small sizes and in dense settings. Only regular and bold ship, so it is a body face first, and it is harmonized with PT Sans for a matched pair.
The obvious substitution is Georgia — same sturdy proportions, same on-screen brief — followed by Times New Roman, where the multilingual coverage makes PT Serif the better option for documents mixing Latin and Cyrillic. Its dark, even texture also covers Plantin and Imperial in magazine and news settings, and it stands in for Tiempos when the job calls for economical, no-nonsense body text on a Times-adjacent skeleton.
- Designer
- ParaType
- Released
- 2010
- Available at
- Google Fonts →
PT Serif is also a free alternative to…
- Georgia → A transitional serif with humanist terminals, sharing Georgia's sturdy proportions and generous x-height. Harmonized with PT Sans, so you get a matched sans/serif pair for free.
- Imperial → A compact, economical text serif with sturdy strokes and a no-nonsense news voice; it holds up at small sizes and dense settings the way Imperial was engineered to.
- New York → A robust transitional serif engineered for low-resolution legibility, with New York's upright, workmanlike posture. Only regular and bold weights, so it suits body text more than display.
- Plantin → Shares Plantin's compactness, sturdiness, and dark, even texture on the page; less historical in flavor but an excellent practical substitute for dense magazine-style settings.
- Tiempos → A sturdy, transitional workhorse serif with restrained contrast — a strong stand-in for Tiempos when you need economical, no-nonsense legible body text with a traditional Times-adjacent structure.
- Times New Roman → Multilingual workhorse serif with extensive Cyrillic coverage. Designed for body text and substitutes cleanly for Times in documents that mix Latin and Cyrillic — useful where Times itself is awkward outside English-only settings.
- Cambria → A transitional serif built for screen use with robust, slightly squared forms and an extensive Cyrillic, which matches Cambria's multi-script brief closely. It is wider and a touch more humanist, with longer serifs than Cambria's stubby ones.
- Bitstream Vera Serif → A transitional serif drawn for screen and print use with a generous x-height and clean, even color, so it sets at similar sizes to Vera Serif without looking heavy. The serifs are finer and the overall tone more humanist, giving text a softer, more editorial feel.
- DejaVu Serif → A humanist text serif made for public use with strong, blunt serifs and a large x-height that hold up on screens the way DejaVu Serif does. Its strokes carry more contrast and its italic is a true cursive, so it feels more refined and less mechanical than DejaVu Serif.
- Georgia Pro → ParaType's transitional text face has the vertical stress, moderate contrast and open counters that make Georgia comfortable on screen, plus full Cyrillic to match Georgia Pro's language coverage. It is narrower and more compact in feel, and offers only four styles, so it has no answer to the Condensed and Black cuts.
Display + body that work together
Headlines that read at a glance
Two thousand years of letterforms boil down to a handful of decisions — width, weight, proportion. Pick a pair you trust, and let the rest take care of itself.
Editorial · Modern PT Serif + Public Sans
A grammar of empty space
Crisp, even strokes give the display its punch. Quiet serifs underneath stay readable across thousands of words — used together by editors at the kind of paper that still prints corrections.