One of the fonts I recently discovered and started enjoying a lot is Adobe Caslon. Here’s a small sample of what it looks at 600 dpi, rendered from XeLaTeX. The text sample is from “Advice to Little Girls”, a humorous short story written by Mark Twain in 1867.
The more I look at text typeset with Caslon the more I like the round, elegant shapes of the characters (despite the “serif” style of the font); the beautiful ligatures of “ff”, “fi”, and “fl”; the clear-cut serifs of the upper part of high glyphs; the punctuation marks that stand out out with their brightly distinct shapes (note the full stop characters, the commas, and the quotation marks near “chewing-gum”).
these aren’t freely available, are they?
No, Adobe’s Caslon font series is not freely available.