Liberation fonts

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. Liberation Sans and Liberation Serif were derived from Ascender Sans and Ascender Serif respectively; Liberation Mono uses base designs from Ascender Sans and Ascender Uni Duo.

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. 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 slashed zero and various changes made for the benefit of internationalization.

Some other GNU/Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Mandriva Linux) included Liberation fonts in their default...
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