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Text freedom with Red Hat's Liberation fonts

http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=1532

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Text freedom with Red Hat's Liberation fonts
By Staff Writer
21 May, 2007

Linux company Red Hat has released the Liberation font set which can be used
to replace the Microsoft core truetype fonts installed on most PCs.

The three Liberation typefaces <https://www.redhat.com/promo/fonts/> are
free replacements for the Windows core fonts Arial, Courier New, and Times
New Roman. The fonts, designed by Ascender Corp<http://www.ascendercorp.com/>,
have been made to be metric equivalents of the Microsoft fonts. This means
that they occupy the exact same horizontal space that the Microsoft fonts
do, ensuring that documents don't have to be reformatted because of sizing
issues.

Linux.com <http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/05/16/1318240> provides
the following potted history of Red Hat's font initiative: "Red Hat has a
long history of interest in high-quality fonts that allow interoperability
between operating systems. According to Mark Webbink, deputy general counsel
and secretary at Red Hat, versions of the Red Hat distribution in the late
1990s included versions of Arial, Courier New, and Times Roman until a third
party brought a case against the company for violation of Microsoft's
copyrights.

"The dispute was settled out of court. In 2004, Red Hat announced it was
licensing three proprietary fonts from Agfa Monotype that were metrically
equivalent to the Windows core fonts: Albany, Cumberland, and Thorndale (the
initial letter of each font is the same as the font it was designed to
replace). These fonts were distributed on the Extras CD included in the Red
Hat commercial box, but 'they weren't free and they weren't open, and that
was frustrating for us,' Webbink says."

Red Hat released the fonts at the Red Hat summit last week under the name
Liberation. There are three sets, 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).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora users can get the fonts through the RHN
system. Other users can download them here<http://www.redhat.com/promo/fonts/>
.

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Cheers,
Subir

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