Font CDs: the discs of the 1990s font boom

For about fifteen years, fonts traveled on plastic. A TrueType file ran 30 to 60 kilobytes, so a floppy disk held a couple of dozen fonts and a CD-ROM held thousands. Between the arrival of TrueType in 1991 and the arrival of broadband, the CD was the font distribution network, and software stores stocked a whole shelf of font discs: professional libraries at professional prices, twenty-dollar retail bundles with inflated counts on the box, and shareware discs that pressed the early freeware scene onto a platter. This page is a guide to that shelf: the discs that mattered, what was actually on them, and what became of their contents.

The professional libraries

At the top of the market, a font CD was not a bargain bin. It was a foundry’s whole catalog on one disc, sold under license.

The Bitstream Typeface Library (v2, 1991) was among the first: Bitstream’s faces in one package, each font supplied as AFM data, Mac suitcase and Type 1. Bitstream also supplied the era’s plumbing. Its outlines sat inside products from Corel, Canon (the 1992 Canon TrueType Font Pack is Bitstream’s library in Canon dress) and half the industry.

Adobe Font Folio defined the high end for two decades. Version 7 (1995) already held over 2,000 Type 1 faces. Font Folio 11 (2007) carried more than 2,300 OpenType fonts and cost $8,999 for a 20-user license. Adobe discontinued it only in 2022, when the subscription library made the big disc obsolete. We have since documented the final edition the way every entry on this shelf deserves: Font Folio: the whole Adobe Type Library in a box tells the product’s story, and Font Folio 11.1: the complete font list transcribes Adobe’s own published list in full, 2,429 entries in 553 families, with specimen plates cropped from the list itself.

Microsoft’s TrueType Font Packs (1992, and Font Pack 2 in 1993) did the opposite job: they put Monotype’s core faces, Arial and the Times New Roman family expansions among them, into homes and small offices at consumer prices, and taught a generation that fonts were something you could buy more of.

The library most people actually owned came free with software. CorelDRAW bundled several hundred Bitstream TrueType fonts on its program discs through the 1990s versions, alongside Bitstream’s Font Navigator manager. For many small design shops, the Corel disc was the font library.

The retail bundles

Below the pro tier sat the shelf this site keeps coming back to: retail bundles that licensed other companies’ libraries, printed a large number on the box, and sold the lot for the price of a pizza night.

ClickArt Fonts 2 is the one we have taken apart file by file. The ClickArt Fonts series ran four numbered editions under Broderbund and then Riverdeep (the first by 1997, Fonts 2’s best-known pressing from 2002, Fonts 3 and 4 after), one branch of a much larger ClickArt line of themed image CDs. The box claims 10,000+ by counting alphabet and headline images; the disc holds 2,638 font files in 845 families, digitized by Bay Animation, MicroLogic and Weatherly Systems, with Broderbund itself designing none of them. Our complete list of its contents is the model for how every disc on this page deserves to be documented.

SoftKey was the bundle shelf’s volume king. KeyFonts Pro (1996) offered 1,222 scalable PostScript and TrueType fonts; Fonts Pro 2002 advertised over 2,000, for Windows and Mac alike. SoftKey’s discs were everywhere software was sold cheap, and their libraries were licensed in bulk the same way Broderbund’s were. We later harvested the surviving discs and read the font files inside them: the full census is in SoftKey’s font empire.

The rest of the shelf ran on the same formula. RomTech’s Galaxy Fonts (1997) claimed over 2,600 fonts. DR. FONTS (Accurate Research, 1993) claimed more than 2,000 TrueType fonts for Windows. Fantazia Concepts sold Two Thousand Fonts (1994) and a Fonts 2000 set split between TrueType and Type 1. SoftKey Multimedia took a different angle with Handwriting Fonts (1996): 300 TrueType handwriting fonts, published under SoftKey’s name with the font data licensed from Weatherly Systems, a credit carried inside the font files themselves. Boss Fonts (Arts & Letters) paired its library with a font manager, reaching a claimed 4,000 fonts by its 2001 edition.

Read those counts the way the ClickArt numbers taught us: claimed fonts on a box usually means files, styles and sometimes picture alphabets summed together. The families underneath were typically a third to a quarter of the headline number, and the digitization was typically somebody else’s.

The shareware discs

The third kind of font CD was not a bundle of licenses but a snapshot of a scene. Through the early 1990s, hobbyist designers traded fonts on bulletin boards and the young web: David Rakowski’s freeware faces, the Apostrophic Labs releases, hundreds of one-person foundries. Shareware publishers pressed that world onto CDs.

2700 Sharing TrueType Fonts (Powersource Multimedia, 1995) is the canonical example, and we have inventoried it the same way as the ClickArt disc: 2,613 TrueType files in 2,023 families, the early freeware scene nearly whole, including fonts whose authors are still releasing work today. Walnut Creek’s Font Garden (1995), from the era’s biggest shareware CD publisher, did the same for Mac and PC together. The BMUG Font ROM discs came from the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group and stuck to license-free fonts. Just Fonts (1993) mixed shareware and public domain material, and the Amiga had its own line in Danny Amor’s Fresh Fonts volumes (1994 and 1995), about 200 families across four Amiga-era formats.

These discs matter beyond nostalgia. Their contents were made to be copied, so they became the seed stock of the free font web, and a large share of the freeware catalog of the 1990s survives today because a shareware publisher pressed it into polycarbonate.

The shelf, listed

Disc	Publisher	Year	Fonts claimed	Kind
Bitstream Typeface Library v2	Bitstream	1991	library catalog	Professional
Microsoft TrueType Font Pack	Microsoft / Monotype	1992	core faces	Consumer pack
Canon TrueType Font Pack	Canon / Bitstream	1992	library subset	Professional
TrueType Font Pack 2	Microsoft / Monotype	1993	core faces	Consumer pack
DR. FONTS	Accurate Research	1993	2,000+	Retail bundle
Just Fonts	$ave-on $oftware	1993	shareware set	Shareware
Two Thousand Fonts	Fantazia Concepts	1994	2,000	Retail bundle
Fresh Fonts Vol. 1 and 2	Danny Amor	1994, 1995	about 200 families	Amiga shareware
KeyFonts Pro	SoftKey	1996	1,222	Retail bundle
Font Folio 7	Adobe	1995	2,000+	Professional
2700 Sharing TrueType Fonts	Powersource Multimedia	1995	2,700	Shareware
Font Garden	Walnut Creek CDROM	1995	shareware set	Shareware
BMUG Font ROM	Berkeley Mac Users Group	1990s	license-free set	Shareware
Castcraft OPTI fonts	Castcraft Software	1990-1994	~900 library	Retail bundle
Fonts Pro 2002	SoftKey	1996	2,000+	Retail bundle
Handwriting Fonts	SoftKey Multimedia (WSI data)	1996	300	Retail bundle
ClickArt Fonts	Broderbund	1997	thousands	Retail bundle
Galaxy Fonts	RomTech	1997	2,600+	Retail bundle
500 Fonts	Media Graphics International	1997	500	Retail bundle
Boss Fonts	Arts & Letters	2001	4,000	Retail bundle
ClickArt Fonts 2	Broderbund / Riverdeep	2002	10,000+ with images	Retail bundle
ClickArt Fonts 3	Broderbund / Riverdeep	2000s	thousands	Retail bundle
ClickArt Fonts 4	Broderbund / Riverdeep	2000s	thousands	Retail bundle
Font Folio 11	Adobe	2007	2,300+	Professional
Font Folio 11.1	Adobe	2011	2,433	Professional
ZIP Font CD-ROM	(Danish compilation)	2007	6,000+	Shareware
Fraktur Mon Amour companion CD	Hermann Schmidt	2008	book’s blackletter set	Book companion

What became of them

The download era dissolved the shelf into websites, and the contents scattered unevenly. The professional libraries became subscription services. The shareware discs’ fonts, made to travel, are the backbone of every free font archive. The retail bundles fared worst: licensed libraries, sold as product, were strip-mined by download sites that treated a pressed CD as abandonware, and their fonts still circulate stripped of the credits their files carry inside them.

The discs themselves are well preserved. The Internet Archive holds images of most of the titles above, which is how the ClickArt inventory was built. We are working through the shelf disc by disc, publishing the verified contents of each: what the box claimed, what the files say, and who really made the fonts. ClickArt Fonts 2 was the first. It will not be the last.