I was reminded yesterday that just because I know something, doesn’t mean that everyone knows it. This time it was some friends who really didn’t like their current fonts in Ubuntu and OpenSolaris respectively. So, I suggested that they try Red Hat’s open-source Liberation fonts. To my surprise, it turns out they didn’t know about them.
Well, let me tell all of you about Liberation fonts. These are, to my eye, very clean, attractive fonts for both screen and print use. Red Hat designed them together with Ascender Corp., a leading commercial developer of fonts, to develop font sets that were metrically equivalent to the major Microsoft fonts.
Red Hat and Ascender were successful. There are three sets of Liberation fonts: Sans (a substitute for Arial, Albany, Helvetica, Nimbus Sans L, and Bitstream Vera Sans), Serif (a substitute for Times New Roman, Thorndale, Nimbus Roman, and Bitstream Vera Serif) and Mono (a substitute for Courier New, Cumberland, Courier, Nimbus Mono L, and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono). Specifically, Sans is closest to Arial; Serif works best as a replacement for Times New Roman; and Mono is a near-twin to Courier New.
