Fedora Weekly News Issue 87

[Tim]

On Mon, 2007-05-14 at 01:56 -0700, Thomas Chung sent:
> === Liberations fonts from Red Hat ===
> 
> RahulSundaram reports in fedora-marketing-list[1],
> 
> "Red Hat has released Liberation fonts[2] under the GPL+ fonts
> exception license. Liberation fonts are metric equivalent to key
> Microsoft fonts. This is a major milestone and significantly enhances
> the interoperability of documents and content under these Microsoft
> fonts in Linux."
> 
> [1]
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2007-May/msg00020.html
> 
> [2] http://www.press.redhat.com/2007/05/09/liberation-fonts/

Sounds useful, but a little over-ambitiously stated.  Following the
second link, I ended up at <https://www.redhat.com/promo/fonts/>, where
I read:

    "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).
    The fonts are now available for you to install."

Thankfully, the font's aren't named simply "Sans," "Serif," & "Mono," as
that seems to suggest, and as already stupidly done in a few instances.
But I think that trying to suggest that one particular font is a
substitute for all those fonts (times three), ignores that they're all
*quite* different (size, spacing, weight, etc. - a variety of things
that means one font doesn't replace another, as any sort of equivelent).

I know that when I've tried one for another, as some equivelency lists
suggest, they're not all the same sizes as each other (i.e. we could
have *a* font the same size as Microsoft's Times font, but not *one*
font the same as all of those *different* Roman fonts, likewise for the
other families).  Also, you can't have one monospace font that
*replaces* Courier and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, for instance.  One's a
serif font, the other is not; and they're not the same size as each
other, either.

Heck, even fonts called "Helvetica" are different, depending on where
you got them from.

P.S. Why do most of the names in those news letters run first and last
names together?  It looks like really bad typing.

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