| Category | Sans-serif |
|---|---|
| Foundry | Ascender Corp. |
| License | GPL v2 with some exceptions |
| Category | Serif |
|---|---|
| Foundry | Ascender Corp. |
| License | GPL v2 with some exceptions |
| Category | Monospace |
|---|---|
| Foundry | Ascender Corp. |
| License | GPL v2 with some exceptions |
Liberation is the collective name of four TrueType font families: Liberation Sans, Liberation Sans Narrow, Liberation Serif and Liberation Mono. These fonts are metric-compatible with Monotype Corporation's Arial, Arial Narrow, Times New Roman, and Courier New (respectively), the most commonly used fonts on Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office suite.[1]
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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 encumbered fonts.
All three fonts support code pages 437, 737, 775, 850, 852, 855, 857, 860, 861, 863, 865, 866, 869, 1250, 1251, 1252, 1253, 1254, 1257, the Macintosh Character Set (US Roman), and the Windows OEM character set.
The fonts were developed by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corp. 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.[2]
The fonts were developed in two stages. The first release 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.
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.
In April 2010, Oracle Corporation contributed the Liberation Sans Narrow typefaces to the project.[3] They are metrically compatible to the popular Arial Narrow font family.[4] With Liberation Fonts 1.06 the new typefaces were officially released.[5]
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 you 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 you received it.[6] Thus, these fonts permit free and open source software (FLOSS) 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.[7][8]
Some other GNU/Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu, OpenSUSE[9] and Mandriva Linux[10][11]) included Liberation fonts in their default installations. The open source software OpenOffice.org included Liberation fonts in its installation packages for some supported operating systems.[12][13][14][15][16]
Google distributes versions of these fonts (with additional glyphs and slight changes in line height??) as Tinos, Arimo and Cousine as part of the Google Chrome OS.
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