Liberation fonts

Short description: Open-source font superfamily

Liberation Sans

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|

* Arial

Liberation Serif

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|

* Times New Roman

Liberation Serif is metrically identical to Times New Roman. However, designer Steve Matteson changed the letterforms considerably, making it less rounded and more squared.

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.

## Contents

* 1 Characteristics
* 2 Unicode coverage
* 3 History
* 4 Distribution
* 4.1 Version 2.00.0 or above
* 4.2 Older versions
* 5 Unsupported features
* 6 See also
* 7 References
* 8 External links

## 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. This means that the letters and symbols width and height between the Liberation fonts and the corresponding Monotype fonts are identical, and the Monotype fonts can be substituted by the corresponding Liberation font without changing the document layout.

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,[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.

## 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 ChromeOS Fonts released under the SIL Open Font License, and all fonts are developed at GitHub.[8]

### 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.[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.

## 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.

## 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.
* GNU FreeFont, derived from Nimbus, but with a better Unicode support.

Other

* Open-source Unicode typefaces

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Licence, Liberation Fonts Github page, https://github.com/liberationfonts/liberation-fonts/blob/main/LICENSE
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Liberation Fonts, Fedora, https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/liberation-fonts, retrieved 2022-01-04 .
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Willis, Nathan (2012-06-19). "Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization". LWN. https://lwn.net/Articles/502371/.
4. ↑ Webbink, Mark (2007-05-09). "Liberation Fonts". Red Hat. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/liberation-fonts.
5. ↑ "Liberation-fonts changelog". https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/log/source?limit=100&rev=6a0937d12046ea7430315a89420ec4846dd37d42&mode=stop_on_copy&format=changelog.
6. ↑ "OpenOffice.org 3.3 New Features". http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.3/index.html#New_Narrow_Font_Family.
7. ↑ Pravin, S (Jul 2010) (Blogger), Liberation Sans release 1.06, http://pravin-s.blogspot.com/2010/07/new-released-liberation-fonts.html .
8. ↑ "liberationfonts" (in en). https://github.com/liberationfonts.
9. ↑ License.txt - LICENSE AGREEMENT AND LIMITED PRODUCT WARRANTY, LIBERATION FONT SOFTWARE, https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/browser/source/License.txt, retrieved 2010-01-15
10. ↑ Bugzilla entries for the revised Liberation fonts included in Fedora 9, Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug List
11. ↑ Bugzilla screenshot of the revised Liberation Mono font with dotted zero, Red Hat Bugzilla - Bug #252149 (Image)
12. ↑ "opensuse-oss-i586/liberation2-fonts-2.00.1-2.1.1.noarch.rpm". http://pkgs.org/opensuse-12.3/opensuse-oss-i586/liberation2-fonts-2.00.1-2.1.1.noarch.rpm.html. "/liberation2-fonts-2.00.1-2.1.1.noarch.rpm"
13. ↑ Mandriva Linux 2008 Release Tour, http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandriva/2008.0/What's_New#Liberation_font_set, retrieved 2010-04-04, "integrated into Mandriva Linux 2008"
14. ↑ Packages included in Mandriva Linux 2010 Free x86-64 linked from, http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/uploads/9/97/Mandriva-linux-free-2010.0-x86_64.idx, retrieved 2010-04-04, "FREE-2010-x86_64 /main/fonts-ttf-liberation-1.04-2mdv2010.0.noarch"
15. ↑ "OpenOffice.org Wiki - External/Modules". http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/External/Modules#Fonts.
16. ↑ "OpenOffice.org - Issue 77705 - Liberation font and OOo". http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=77705.
17. ↑ "OpenOffice.org - Issue 104723 - Update Liberation fonts to v1.05.1.20090721". http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=104723.
18. ↑ "OpenOffice.org - Issue 111719 - Update Liberation fonts to v1.06". http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=111719.
19. ↑ ooo-build - patches - dev300 (OpenOffice.org 3.xx patches), http://cgit.freedesktop.org/ooo-build/ooo-build/tree/patches/dev300/apply?h=ooo-build-3-1-1, retrieved 2010-01-31
20. ↑ "Liberation vs Croscore fonts". https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/I18N/Liberation_vs_Croscore_fonts.

## External links

* at github.com
* Liberation font files at the releases page
* Liberation Sans Narrow files at the releases page
* Liberation Sans font (Red Hat-related), Fontsy, http://fontsy.com/font_details_21967.html, retrieved 2011-02-11 .

* v
* t
* e

Free and open-source typography

Software and libraries|

* FontForge
* Fontmatrix
* FreeType
* Ghostscript
* HarfBuzz
* Metafont
* MetaPost
* METATYPE1
* Pango
* TeX
* Graphite (SIL)
* ICU

Licenses|

* Apache License
* BSD licenses
* Creative Commons licenses
* GNU General Public License \+ GPL font exception
* GNU Lesser General Public License
* LaTeX Project Public License
* MIT License
* SIL Open Font License
* Ubuntu Font Licence

Operating system,
corporate and
professional|

* Bitstream Charter
* Bitstream Vera
* DejaVu
* Breeze Sans
* Cascadia Code
* Cantarell
* Charis SIL
* Computer Modern
* Concrete Roman
* Courier Prime
* Doulos SIL
* Droid
* Noto
* Open Sans
* Fira Sans
* Ghostscript fonts
* GNU FreeFont
* GNU Unifont
* Hershey fonts
* IBM Plex
* Liberation
* Croscore
* Literata
* Lohit
* Nimbus Mono
* Sans
* Roman
* OCR-A
* OCR-B
* Overpass
* PT Fonts
* Roboto
* Selawik
* Source Code
* Source Han Sans
* Source Han Serif
* Source Sans
* Source Serif
* STIX fonts
* Tiresias
* Ubuntu, Ubuntu Titling
* Utopia
* WenQuanYi
* Zilla Slab

Other
typefaces|

* Amiri
* Antykwa Półtawskiego
* Allerta
* Asana-Math
* Cardo
* Chandas
* Comic Neue
* Cormorant
* EB Garamond
* Gentium
* Inconsolata
* IM Fell
* Jomolhari
* Junicode
* Kochi
* Lato
* Linux Libertine
* M+
* News Cycle
* Open Baskerville
* OpenDyslexic
* Railway Sans
* Squarish Sans CT
* Theano Didot
* XITS

Groups and
people|

* Donald Knuth
* Font Awesome
* Greek Font Society
* Font Library
* Google Fonts
* SIL International

* Open-source Unicode typefaces
* List of open source typefaces
* List of free software Unicode typefaces

* v
* t
* e

Monospaced programming and typewriter fonts

Sans serif|

| Outline|

| Default zero regular|

* Droid Sans Mono
* Everson Mono
* Letter Gothic
* Liberation Mono
* Lucida Console
* Noto Sans Mono
* OCR-A
* OCR-B

|

Default zero dotted|

* Andalé Mono
* Cascadia Code
* Cousine
* DejaVu Sans Mono
* Fira Mono
* Hack
* IBM Plex Mono
* Input
* JetBrains Mono
* Overpass Mono
* PragmataPro
* Source Code Pro
* Ubuntu Mono

Default zero slashed|

* Consolas
* Envy Code R
* Fantasque Sans Mono
* Go Mono
* HyperFont
* Inconsolata
* Iosevka
* Luculent
* M+ FONTS
* Menlo
* Monaco
* ProFont
* PT Mono
* Roboto Mono
* San Francisco Mono

Pixel(ized)|

* 3x3
* Fixed
* Fixedsys
* GNU Unifont
* Terminal

Serif|

* IBM Courier
* FreeMono
* Linux Libertine Mono
* Monospace
* Nimbus Mono L
* Prestige Elite
* Tex Gyre Cursor

Samples of monospaced typefaces

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