TeX Gyre Termes, by Bogusław Jackowski and Janusz M. Nowacki of the GUST e-foundry, is a transitional serif made to stand in for Times. The drawing traces back to Nimbus Roman, and the family is metric-compatible, meaning the widths match what existing documents already expect. Swap the old font out and your line breaks and page counts hold. For anyone maintaining a template, that is worth more than novelty.

It reads the way a book serif should: steady, quiet, easy on the eye at small sizes over many pages. LaTeX users will recognize it immediately, since this is the kind of face that carries dissertation chapters typeset in LaTeX, journal article submissions bound by strict style sheets, and long-form book interiors where a reader stays for hours. Print work benefits too, from annual report body copy to course handouts that need a serif without personality getting in the way.

Four files come in the family, covering multiple weights and styles, with the Regular as the main file here. Language support reaches 322+ Latin-based languages, which matters when a bibliography carries names and titles in half a dozen of them. Released under the GUST Font License (LPPL 1.3c), an open license, it is free for personal and commercial work, and the files download directly from this page.