Category | Sans-serif |
---|---|
Classification | Neo-grotesque |
Designer(s) | Steve Matteson |
Foundry | Ascender Corporation |
License | SIL Open Font License (version 2 onwards) [1] GPL font exception (older versions) [2] |
Variations | Arimo |
Metrically compatible with |
Category | Serif |
---|---|
Classification | Transitional |
Foundry | Ascender Corporation |
License | SIL Open Font License (version 2 onwards) [1] GPL font exception (older versions) [2] |
Variations | Tinos |
Metrically compatible with |
Liberation is the collective name of four TrueType font families: Liberation Sans, Liberation Sans Narrow, Liberation Serif, and Liberation Mono. These fonts are metrically compatible with the most popular fonts on the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office software package (Monotype Corporation's Arial, Arial Narrow, Times New Roman and Courier New, respectively), for which Liberation is intended as a free substitute. [2] The fonts are default in LibreOffice.
Liberation Sans, Sans Narrow, Serif and Mono closely match the metrics of Monotype Corporation fonts Arial, Arial Narrow, Times New Roman and Courier New [lower-alpha 1] respectively. This means that the characters of each Liberation font are identical in width and height to those of each corresponding Monotype font. It allows the Liberation fonts to serve as free, open-source replacements of the proprietary Monotype fonts without changing the document layout.
All three fonts supported IBM/Microsoft code pages 437, 737, 775, 850, 852, 855, 857, 858, 860, 861, 863, 865, 866, 869, 1250, 1251, 1252, 1253, 1254, 1257, the Macintosh Character Set (US Roman), and the Windows OEM character set,[ citation needed ] that is, the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, leaving out many writing systems. Extension to other writing systems was prevented by its unique licensing terms. [3] Since the old fonts were replaced by the Croscore equivalents, expanded Unicode coverage has become possible.
The fonts were developed by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corporation as Ascender Sans and Ascender Serif. A variant of this font family, with the addition of a monospaced font and open-source license, was licensed by Red Hat Inc. as the Liberation font family. [4] Liberation Sans and Liberation Serif derive from Ascender Sans and Ascender Serif respectively; Liberation Mono uses base designs from Ascender Sans and Ascender Uni Duo.
The fonts were developed in two stages. The first release of May 2007 was a set of fully usable fonts, but they lacked the full hinting capability. The second release, made available in the beginning of 2008, provides full hinting of the fonts.
In April 2010, Oracle Corporation contributed the Liberation Sans Narrow typefaces to the project. [5] They are metrically compatible with the popular Arial Narrow font family. [6] With Liberation Fonts 1.06 the new typefaces were officially released. [7]
As of December 2018, Liberation Fonts 2.00.0 and above are a fork of the ChromeOS Fonts released under the SIL Open Font License, and all fonts are developed at GitHub. [8]
Red Hat licensed these fonts from Ascender Corp under the GNU General Public License with a font embedding exception, which states that documents embedding these fonts do not automatically fall under the GNU GPL. As a further exception, any distribution of the object code of the Software in a physical product must provide the right to access and modify the source code for the Software and to reinstall that modified version of the Software in object code form on the same physical product on which it was received. [9] Thus, these fonts permit free and open-source software (FOSS) systems to have high-quality fonts that are metric-compatible with Microsoft software.
The Fedora Project, as of version 9, was the first major Linux distribution to include these fonts by default and features a slightly revised versions of the Liberation fonts contributed by Ascender. These include a dotted zero and various changes made for the benefit of internationalization. [10] [11]
Some other Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu, OpenSUSE [12] and Mandriva Linux [13] [14] ) included Liberation fonts in their default installations. The open source software LibreOffice, OpenOffice.org and Collabora Online included Liberation fonts in their installation packages for all supported operating systems. [15] [16] [17] [18] [19]
Due to licensing concerns with fonts released under a GPL license, some projects looked for alternatives to the Liberation fonts. [3] Starting with Apache OpenOffice 3.4, Liberation Fonts were replaced with the ChromeOS Fonts [20] – also known as Croscore fonts: Arimo (sans), Cousine (monospace), and Tinos (serif) – which are made available by Ascender Corporation under the Apache License 2.0.
Unlike modern versions of Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New, Liberation fonts do not support OpenType advanced typography features like ligatures, old style numerals, or fractions.
Typefaces
Other
Helvetica, also known by its original name Neue Haas Grotesk, is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann.
Arial is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts in the neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows after Windows 3.1, as well as in other Microsoft programs, Apple's macOS, and many PostScript 3 printers.
Tahoma is a humanist sans-serif typeface that Matthew Carter designed for Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft first distributed it, along with Carter's Verdana, as a computer font with Office 97.
Arial Unicode MS is a TrueType font and the extended version of the font Arial. Compared to Arial, it includes higher line height, omits kerning pairs and adds enough glyphs to cover a large subset of Unicode 2.1—thus supporting most Microsoft code pages, but also requiring much more storage space. It also adds Ideographic layout tables, but unlike Arial, it mandates no smoothing in the 14–18 point range, and contains Roman (upright) glyphs only; there is no oblique (italic) version. Arial Unicode MS was previously distributed with Microsoft Office, but this ended in 2016 version. It is bundled with Mac OS X v10.5 and later. It may also be purchased separately from Ascender Corporation, who licenses the font from Microsoft.
Courier is a monospaced slab serif typeface commissioned by IBM and designed by Howard "Bud" Kettler (1919–1999) in the mid-1950s. The Courier name and typeface concept are in the public domain. Courier has been adapted for use as a computer font, and versions of it are installed on most desktop computers.
Luxi is a family of typefaces originally designed for the X Window System by Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow from Bigelow & Holmes Inc. The Luxi typefaces are similar to Lucida – their previous font design.
Core fonts for the Web was a project started by Microsoft in 1996 to create a standard pack of fonts for the World Wide Web. It included the proprietary fonts Andalé Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and Webdings, all of them in TrueType font format packaged in executable files (".exe") for Microsoft Windows and in BinHexed Stuff-It archives (".sit.hqx") for Macintosh. These packages were published as freeware under a proprietary license imposing some restrictions on distribution.
The DejaVu fonts are a superfamily of fonts designed for broad coverage of the Unicode Universal Character Set. The fonts are derived from Bitstream Vera (sans-serif) and Bitstream Charter (serif), two fonts released by Bitstream under a free license that allowed derivative works based upon them; the Vera and Charter families were limited mainly to the characters in the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement portions of Unicode, roughly equivalent to ISO/IEC 8859-15, and Bitstream's licensing terms allowed the fonts to be expanded upon without explicit authorization. The DejaVu fonts project was started with the aim to "provide a wider range of characters ... while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development". The development of the fonts is done by many contributors and is organized through a wiki and a mailing list.
GNU FreeFont is a family of free OpenType, TrueType and WOFF vector fonts, implementing as much of the Universal Character Set (UCS) as possible, aside from the very large CJK Asian character set. The project was initiated in 2002 by Primož Peterlin and is now maintained by Steve White.
Linux Libertine is a typeface created by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create free and open alternatives to proprietary typefaces such as Times New Roman. It was developed with the free font editor FontForge and is licensed under the GNU General Public License and the SIL Open Font License.
Ascender Corporation was a digital typeface foundry and software development company in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois. It was founded in 2004 by a team of software developers, typographers, and people previously involved in developing fonts used widely in computers, inkjet printers, phones, and other digital technology devices. On December 8, 2010, Ascender Corp. was acquired by Monotype Imaging.
Droid is a font family first released in 2007 and created by Ascender Corporation for use by the Open Handset Alliance platform Android and licensed under the Apache License. The fonts are intended for use on the small screens of mobile handsets and were designed by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corporation.
Steven R. Matteson is an American typeface designer whose work is included in several computer operating systems and embedded in game consoles, cell phones and other electronic devices. He is the designer of the Microsoft font family Segoe included since Windows XP; of the Droid font collection used in the Android mobile device platform, and designed the brand and user-interface fonts used in both the original Microsoft Xbox and the Xbox 360.
Nimbus Roman is a serif typeface created by URW Studio in 1982.
Nimbus Sans is a sans-serif typeface created by URW++, based on Helvetica.
Nimbus Mono is a monospaced typeface created by URW Studio in 1984, and eventually released under the GPL and AFPL in 1996 and LPPL in 2009. In 2017, the font, alongside other Core 35 fonts, has been additionally licensed under the terms of OFL. It features Normal, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic weights, and is one of several freely licensed fonts offered by URW++. Although not exactly the same, Nimbus Mono has metrics and glyphs that are very similar to Courier and Courier New.
The Public Type or PT Fonts are a family of free and open-source fonts released from 2009 onwards, comprising PT Sans, PT Serif and PT Mono. They were commissioned from the design agency ParaType by Rospechat, a department of the Russian Ministry of Communications, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Peter the Great's orthography reform and to create a font family that supported all the different variations of Cyrillic script used by the minority languages of Russia, as well as the Latin alphabet.
Noto is a free font family comprising over 100 individual computer fonts, which are together designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard. As of October 2016, Noto fonts cover all 93 scripts defined in Unicode version 6.1, although fewer than 30,000 of the nearly 75,000 CJK unified ideographs in version 6.0 are covered. In total, Noto fonts cover over 77,000 characters, which is around half of the 149,186 characters defined in Unicode 15.0.
The ChromeOS core fonts, also known as the Croscore fonts, are a collection of three TrueType font families: Arimo (sans-serif), Tinos (serif) and Cousine (monospace). These fonts are metrically compatible with Monotype Corporation’s Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New, the most commonly used fonts on Microsoft Windows, for which they are intended as open-source substitutes.
/liberation2-fonts-2.00.1-2.1.1.noarch.rpm
integrated into Mandriva Linux 2008
FREE-2010-x86_64 /main/fonts-ttf-liberation-1.04-2mdv2010.0.noarch