Fonts like Century Schoolbook
12 open fonts whose letters are closest to Century Schoolbook, ranked by a glyph comparison. All free for commercial use.
The closest open font to Century Schoolbook is Arbutus Slab (similarity 81), then Redaction and Besley. Arbutus Slab is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and is free for commercial use.
Century Schoolbook
We compared against TeX Gyre Schola, which CTAN describes: “Schola serves as a replacement for the standard New Century Schoolbook font.” (CTAN page, read 2026-10-22)
font-family: "Century Schoolbook", "Arbutus Slab", serif;Use Century Schoolbook when installed on the visitor's device, automatically falling back to Arbutus Slab (closest open lookalike).
Century Schoolbook Licence & Permissions
Commercial font: the licence comes from whoever sells it.
Side-by-side comparison
Top lookalikes compared at the same sizeTop lookalikes: licence permissions
Commercial rights side by sideAll 12 open lookalikes, ranked
Comparison based on letter shape and edge textureFonts made for other scripts with similar Latin letters
How the similarity score works
Each score is calculated by comparing 62 letters and digits (A-Z a-z 0-9) rendered at a 160px cap height on a 32×32 grid with 3px gaussian blur, combined with edge-orientation texture (weighted at 15%).
Scores are normalized on a standardized scale: 100 represents identical letterforms, and 0 represents an average pair among the 1571 fonts compared.