Red Hat releases Liberation Fonts
Mark Webbink, deputy general counsel and secretary at Red Hat announced that RH had entered into contract with Ascender Corp, a leading font foundry, to create the Liberation Fonts which is planned to replace the Arial, Courier New, and Times New Roman fonts which are widely used on Red Hat as well as other Linux-based systems. Though these fonts are not available by default, Linux users tend to install these fonts in order to provide compatibility and support for existing documents which were generated from Microsoft Office as well as other applications that use these fonts.
So far according to Webbink, Liberation is still incomplete with hinting available only at font size 8 up to 40. Any size lesser or higher than the predetermined sizes will have undesirable results. However, the project team expects Liberation to be complete before the end of the year.
Though this is a welcome news for a lot of users of Linux and opensource software, a lot of veteran designers and font enthusiasts think that the fonts are not up what they are designed to be. Of course design work has rigorous demands regarding the typefaces that are used.
Regardless, a lot of people are looking to the time this project will be finished with complete hinting plus better localization support. I myself will be looking at this on a positive light and if the font quality will be _at par_ with the font faces that we use, or even better, then perhaps I will consider these fonts for full time use. However, I will never ever replace Helvetica as ultimate font favorite for multipurpose use.
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