Hi,

I normally use Arial under both Windows and Linux in my GUI apps. But Arial is not standard on most Linux distros - I believe it comes with the additional MS Web Fonts package.

Anyway, recently I saw on WikiPedia that the font Liberation Sans was explicitly designed to have the exact same metrics as Arial. It seem the Liberation Sans font came standard with my Ubuntu 10.04 install.

Do other Linux distros have Liberation Sans font as standard? Thus making it a good alternative to use, compared to Arial (under Linux).

Regards,
- Graeme -

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

Do other Linux distros have Liberation Sans font as standard? Thus making it a good alternative to use, compared to Arial (under Linux).

If I do a locate for "liberation" I don't find anything on my fc14 system

In Mandriva Linux 2010:

There is no Arial font, but:

[felipe at localhost fpvviewer]$ locate Liberation /usr/share/fonts/TTF/liberation/LiberationMono-Bold.ttf /usr/share/fonts/TTF/liberation/LiberationMono-BoldItalic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/TTF/liberation/LiberationMono-Italic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/TTF/liberation/LiberationMono-Regular.ttf /usr/share/fonts/TTF/liberation/LiberationSans-Bold.ttf /usr/share/fonts/TTF/liberation/LiberationSans-BoldItalic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/TTF/liberation/LiberationSans-Italic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/TTF/liberation/LiberationSans-Regular.ttf /usr/share/fonts/TTF/liberation/LiberationSerif-Bold.ttf /usr/share/fonts/TTF/liberation/LiberationSerif-BoldItalic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/TTF/liberation/LiberationSerif-Italic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/TTF/liberation/LiberationSerif-Regular.ttf

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

Do other Linux distros have Liberation Sans font as standard? Thus making it a good alternative to use, compared to Arial (under Linux).

They are part of the ArchLinux Extra repositories.

I'm not calling them standard though, as on ArchLinux not even X is installed by default :P

Regards,
Sven

Op 2011-01-25 11:04, Marco van de Voort het geskryf:

If I do a locate for "liberation" I don't find anything on my fc14 system

Thanks for the info. Under Ubuntu 10.04 they are located at:

/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-liberation/*

I just installed openSUSE 11.3 in a VM session, and I see it includes as standard the Liberation fonts. Ubuntu 9.10 doesn't though. So it seems only newer versions of distros are starting to include those fonts.

Regards,
- Graeme -

As far as I know, Leberation is available in most distribution. In my case it's installed by default in OpenSuse, Sabayon and Desktop installation of Debian (both KDE and Gnome, don't know for the others). The Microsoft fonts package are never installed by default in each of those distributions but is available.

Marco van de Voort wrote

If I do a locate for "liberation" I don't find anything on my fc14 system

Also for Liberation?

It's on the currently-stable Debian ("Lenny") but not on the previous one ("Etch"), this could have a knock-on effect for derivatives such as Ubuntu. In particular, I wonder whether any of the older Ubuntu LTS releases are still in significant use but don't have them.

Op 2011-01-25 11:46, Mark Morgan Lloyd het geskryf:

In particular, I wonder whether any of the older Ubuntu LTS releases are still in significant use but don't have them.

I'm running Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS at home on my laptop. I'll take a look tonight to see if it includes Liberation fonts or not.

Thanks for the info though.

Regards,
- Graeme -

Marco van de Voort kirjoitti tiistai 25 tammikuu 2011 11:04:42:

It is found with capital L :

$ locate Liberation
/usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationMono-Bold.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationMono-BoldItalic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationMono-Italic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationMono-Regular.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSans-Bold.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSans-BoldItalic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSans-Italic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSans-Regular.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSansNarrow-Bold.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSansNarrow-BoldItalic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSansNarrow-Italic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSansNarrow.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSerif-Bold.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSerif-BoldItalic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSerif-Italic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSerif-Regular.ttf

FC14, 64-bit, updated from FC13.

Juha

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote

Also for Liberation?

Indeed, that finds something

/usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationMono-Bold.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationMono-BoldItalic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationMono-Italic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationMono-Regular.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSans-Bold.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSans-BoldItalic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSans-Italic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSans-Regular.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSerif-Bold.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSerif-BoldItalic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSerif-Italic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/LiberationSerif-Regular.ttf [marcov at atlas etc]$

There is no "standard" Debian, since you can choose whether you'd like an X server on startup. This may help you, though (from squeeze):

$ apt-cache rdepends --no-recommends --no-suggests ttf-liberation ttf-liberation
Reverse Depends:
xbmc-skin-pm3-hd
sisu-pdf
moovida-plugins-bad
mokomaze
|libphp-jpgraph
freedink-engine
calibre

Openoffice does recommend it (which means it will get installed automatically by aptitude), but I don't think that openoffice gets installed in a default Gnome install (except if I've followed the dependencies incorrectly). From the above you can see that it's not needed, either way for any "standard" meta packages.

Henry

This also depends on the window manager etc. installed. For example, Debian Lenny with KDE, subsequently upgraded to use gdm (which brings in quite a lot of Gnome stuff) rather than kdm, has LiberationSans. But Lenny installed without a desktop, even if subsequently upgraded with FluxBox and gdm, does not.