Liberation fonts

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]

Liberation Sans
CategorySans-serif
ClassificationNeo-grotesque
Designer(s)Steve Matteson
FoundryAscender Corporation
LicenseSIL Open Font License (version 2 onwards) GPL v2 with some exceptions (older versions)[1]
VariationsArimo
Metrically compatible with
Liberation Serif
CategorySerif
ClassificationTransitional
FoundryAscender Corporation
LicenseSIL Open Font License (version 2 onwards) GPL v2 with some exceptions (older versions)[1]
VariationsTinos
Metrically compatible with
Liberation Mono
CategoryMonospace
FoundryAscender Corporation
LicenseSIL Open Font License (version 2 onwards) GPL v2 with some exceptions (older versions)[1]
VariationsCousine
Metrically compatible with
  • Courier New
Liberation Serif is metrically identical to Times New Roman. However, designer Steve Matteson changed the letterforms considerably, making it less rounded and more squared.

Characteristics

Liberation Sans, Liberation Sans Narrow, and Liberation Serif closely match the metrics of Monotype Corporation fonts Arial, Arial Narrow, and Times New Roman, respectively.

Liberation Mono is styled closer to Liberation Sans than Monotype’s Courier New, though its metrics match with Courier New.

The Liberation fonts are intended as free, open-source replacements of the aforementioned proprietary fonts.

  • Comparison of initial release of Liberation fonts to the fonts with which they are designed to be metric compatible
  • Comparison of Liberation Sans with Arial
  • Comparison of Liberation Serif with Times New Roman
  • Comparison of Liberation Mono with Courier New

Unicode coverage

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, 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.

History

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]

Distribution

Version 2.00.0 or above

As of December 2018, Liberation Fonts 2.00.0 and above are a fork of the Chrome OS Fonts released under the SIL Open Font License, and all fonts are developed at GitHub.[2]

Older versions

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.[8] 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 GNU/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.[9][10]

Some other GNU/Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu, OpenSUSE[11] and Mandriva Linux[12][13]) included Liberation fonts in their default installations. The open source software LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org included Liberation fonts in their installation packages for all supported operating systems.[14][15][16][17][18]

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 Chrome OS Fonts[19] – also known as Croscore fonts: Arimo (sans), Cousine (monospace), and Tinos (serif) – which are newer versions of the same designs but made available by Ascender Corporation under the Apache License 2.0.

Unsupported features

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.

gollark: Please remind everyone when it's nearing AP times?
gollark: My luck is terrible anyway. I've seen basically no rares (except those thunders, which I do not actually want) for ages.
gollark: Not that I have any chance of actually getting it, anyway...
gollark: *ponders being somewhat evil and keeping it if he finds it*
gollark: ***grow***

See also

Typefaces

  • Croscore fonts – fonts which formed the basis for Liberation fonts
  • Droid – a font family by the same font designer
  • Gentium – an Open Font License font which defines roughly 1,500 glyphs covering almost all the range of Latin characters used worldwide
  • Linux Libertine – another free software serif typeface with OpenType features support
  • Nimbus Roman No. 9 L, Nimbus Sans L and Nimbus Mono L – another series of free software fonts also designed to be substituted for Times New Roman, Arial and Courier.
  • FreeFont, derived from Nimbus, but with a better Unicode support.

Other

References
  1. "License", Liberation Fonts, Fedora.
  2. Liberation Fonts, Fedora
  3. Willis, Nathan (2012-06-19). "Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization". LWN. Retrieved 2012-07-16.
  4. Webbink, Mark (2007-05-09). "Liberation Fonts". Red Hat.
  5. "Liberation-fonts changelog". Retrieved 2010-11-11.
  6. "OpenOffice.org 3.3 New Features". Retrieved 2010-11-11.
  7. Pravin, S (Jul 2010), Liberation Sans release 1.06 (Blogger) (World wide web log), Google.
  8. License.txt - LICENSE AGREEMENT AND LIMITED PRODUCT WARRANTY, LIBERATION FONT SOFTWARE, retrieved 2010-01-15
  9. Bugzilla entries for the revised Liberation fonts included in Fedora 9, Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug List
  10. Bugzilla screenshot of the revised Liberation Mono font with dotted zero, Red Hat Bugzilla - Bug #252149 (Image)
  11. "opensuse-oss-i586/liberation2-fonts-2.00.1-2.1.1.noarch.rpm". Archived from the original on 2014-01-15. /liberation2-fonts-2.00.1-2.1.1.noarch.rpm
  12. Mandriva Linux 2008 Release Tour, archived from the original on 2010-06-19, retrieved 2010-04-04, integrated into Mandriva Linux 2008
  13. "Packages included in Mandriva Linux 2010 Free x86-64 linked from", wiki.mandriva.com/en/Mandriva_Linux_2010#Package_Lists, archived from the original on 2010-01-25, retrieved 2010-04-04, FREE-2010-x86_64 /main/fonts-ttf-liberation-1.04-2mdv2010.0.noarch
  14. "OpenOffice.org Wiki - External/Modules". Retrieved 2010-01-31.
  15. "OpenOffice.org - Issue 77705 - Liberation font and OOo". Retrieved 2010-02-05.
  16. "OpenOffice.org - Issue 104723 - Update Liberation fonts to v1.05.1.20090721". Retrieved 2010-02-05.
  17. "OpenOffice.org - Issue 111719 - Update Liberation fonts to v1.06". Retrieved 2010-10-28.
  18. ooo-build - patches - dev300 (OpenOffice.org 3.xx patches), archived from the original on 2009-09-13, retrieved 2010-01-31
  19. "Liberation vs Croscore fonts".
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