Sunday, March 02, 2008

Use Liberation Fonts (on the Mac)

Red Hat is providing replacement fonts for some popular fonts that are used in some other operating systems and especially often in Office documents. Those fonts are called Liberation fonts and can be obtained from this page. The fonts are published on a variation of the GPLv2, that has the exception that if you embed the font in a document, the document itself will not fall under GPLv2 for this very reason (but please read the license file yourself, IANAL.


I installed them on my Mac, which is really simple to do:


  • Download liberation-fonts-ttf-3.tar.gz

  • Double click to unpack them into a folder

  • Go into the folder and read the LICENSE.txt

  • Click on the individual .ttf files to open the font collection app

  • Check in preferences if you want to install the fonts for all users or only you

  • Click on install


And you're done ... The liberation font(s) can now be used as any other font.

1 comment:

codeman38 said...

There's a newer version of the fonts which fixes some issues with the Cyrillic characters, adds hinting (not generally an issue on OS X, but some apps like Photoshop can make use of it), and most notably, adds a distinguishing mark to the 0 in the monospaced font. It can be found as an attachment to this entry on Red Hat's Bugzilla site.