Fedora Weekly News Issue 87

[Rahul Sundaram]

Tim wrote:
> 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).

One font is not a substitute for all these fonts. It is a set of fonts 
that are substitute to another set of fonts. They are already under 
review in Fedora now. Try it out.  The maintainers wouldn't be reading 
all the mails in the list. So send feedback via bugzilla after they get 
into the repository.

Rahul