Talk:Liberation fonts

GPL exceptions
From the article:

Adoption of the fonts has been hampered[1][2] by the following clause in its license:

"(b)As a further exception, any distribution of the object code of the Software in a physical product must provide you the right to access and modify the source code for the Software and to reinstall that modified version of the Software in object code form on the same physical product on which you received it."

This renders the fonts non-distributable because the GPL does not permit additional restrictions to be placed upon a work.

This is nonsense. These are exceptions to the GPL, that is, amendments that make this license incompatible with the standard GPL. The GPL's ban on further restriction is what prompted the amendment in the first place. The license that this font package carries is _not_ the standard GPL, but a variation with caveats that trump the main text. This modified GPL contains an exception to the "no additional restrictions" clause, so saying that it "violates" the GPL is silly because it's not the GPL, it's a modified GPL that is incompatible with the standard. Cherry Cotton 06:24, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Licensing controversy deleted.
I've deleted the entire licensing controversy section. There were no citations and it seemed just silly. Absent a citation showing controversy, the bit about the misunderstanding of the exemption is silly. Lots of people misunderstand lots of things about lots of legal documents; only mainstream misunderstandings are noteworthy. As for the bit about the source code, that's just weird. Plenty of font editors never work with a "textual description." So absent citations backing up these unusual additions, I'm deleting tem. — Alan De Smet | Talk 23:17, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm re-adding it, with citations. It's not about the exception b) which makes the license merely GPL-incompatible but otherwise fine, it's about the rename clause (the "Intellectual Property Rights" section). KiloByte 08:58, 9 August 2007 (UTC)


 * I've deleted most of it again. I dramatically rewrote the first bit to match what can be gleamed from the provided citation.  Ultimately, is a discussion by some random people involved in Debian really noteworthy?  If some of these people were noteworthy in and of themselves for their legal opinions, it might be, but I'm planning on deleting it again soon.  As for the bit about the additional trademark restriction is simply wrong.  Per the GPL, "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms... Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade names, trademarks, or service marks;...."  Absent someone noteworthy putting forth a claim that this is a problem (and that claim being cited in this article), there is no reason to includ this.  The section on the release of source is similarlly completely uncited.  — Alan De Smet | Talk 23:16, 9 August 2007 (UTC)


 * My 2 cents: I don't think the debian-legal discussion is notable enough to include in the article. Now, if someone from the FSF, such as RMS, said "The Liberation font license is not valid", or if the FSF's legal counsel said the same thing, it would be notable.  Samboy 19:06, 24 August 2007 (UTC)


 * You mean where RMS says as much at ? Yrro (talk) 23:52, 25 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I don't see any reference to the Liberation fonts or license in that thread. I instead see a discussion of licensing of "csplain", which appears to be part of a TeX distribution.  We shouldn't go putting words in his mouth based on extrapolation. — Alan De Smet | Talk 01:26, 26 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I've deleted it. It is trivial and outdated. 07:23, 13 September 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.111.145.184 (talk)

What are the units of the statistics?
In the Statistics section, there are big tables of numbers, but little clue as to what those numbers mean. Please document the units of those numbers. 75.185.66.16 17:57, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The statistics and other data are outdated now that the final release has been made. I also feel they don't contribute anything to the article and actually make it unreadable to non-typographers.  Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a font foundry fan site. --KJRehberg (talk) 14:26, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Bugzilla entry for RHEL 5.1 includes the new fonts
The new version of Liberation is on Red Hat's Bugzilla server. It was just released. The files are dated 2007-12-18. seee https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=427791. --KJRehberg (talk) 20:34, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
 * The download page now features the newest version of the fonts. I have updated the article accordingly and added a note that the Fedora 9 version of the fonts is even newer. --KJRehberg (talk) 14:24, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Liberation Font samples' example text
About the example images: The line "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" contains no use of the letter 's'. Was this intentional? I believe the standard line uses "jumps" instead of "jumped". QTachyon (talk) 03:42, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Nope, just a screw up. I tried to mimic existing samples I found elsewhere in Wikipedia.  I don't remember which ones specifically.  They probably got it right and I got it wrong.  Sorry. — Alan De Smet | Talk 04:12, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

It should be "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog", being the shortest version of the sentence to feature all the letters in the English alphabet. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.145.224.224 (talk) 18:49, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
 * But if you change "the" to "a", the sentence will have no lower case "t". Trevor Spiteri (talk) 08:47, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

The example for Liberation Mono seems to be a hoax. The zero (0) in published Liberation Mono is a slashed one with a dot in the middle. But the graphics shows a font with a clean zero. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.198.201.217 (talk) 14:07, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Preview without antialiasing?
Can these fonts be used with hinting, but no antialiasing? Would this also be a useful preview to show. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.194.171.29 (talk) 14:37, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Not installed by default
These fonts are in the apt repository as ttf-liberation, and they are not installed by default on my 10.04 Alpha install (or my 8.04 install). The reference for citation 3 doesn't seem to have anything to do with Liberation, either. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.26.176.48 (talk) 15:09, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
 * You are right, so I have removed the deja "non-"citation number 3. -84user (talk) 18:15, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Dotted Zero, not Slashed Zero in Liberation Mono
I've observed that the '0' (zero) in the Liberation Mono font is dotted, not slashed. Am I mistaken?

Mooglemann (talk) 21:09, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Tinos, Arimo and Cousine
The fonts Tinos, Arimo, and Cousine are not related to the Liberation font family. They were created independently and are not modified versions of the Liberation fonts. They are only similar in that they share the property of being metric compatible with the same fonts, i.e. New Times Roman, Arial, and Courier New, respectfully.

Thus I have removed the statements related to this and placed them as follows:


 * Google distributes versions of these fonts (with additional glyphs and slight changes in line height??) as Tinos, Arimo and Cousine as part of the Google Chrome OS.

69.59.109.49 (talk) 09:47, 1 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Google's Croscore fonts (Tinos, Arimo and Cousine) are in fact "a more recent version of the exact same designs", but made available under the SIL Open Font License. ARK (talk) 12:27, 16 July 2012 (UTC)


 * What, exactly, is a "version of the exact same designs"? If they're the exact same designs, then they aren't another version, and vice versa, surely? — Smjg (talk) 11:33, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

Furthermore, I don't quite understand what the article now says about these fonts. How does one release alternative versions of the fonts without these versions being a derivative work of the original, and therefore subject to the same copyright? Are the original designs public domain, and the Liberation and Croscore font sets independent digitisations of said designs? Does the process of converting a font design into a set of Bézier curves create a new work? — Smjg (talk) 20:56, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

Other Microsoft typefaces
Are there any plans do cover other MS fonts, e.g. Tahoma or Calibri, as well? Or are they provided by a different project?--92.228.131.56 (talk) 09:50, 28 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Other than what? This article isn't about any Microsoft fonts.  It's about the Liberation fonts. — Smjg (talk) 09:58, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

Unicode coverage
cf. Free UCS Outline Fonts or DejaVu fonts how about it? Echinacin35 (talk) 19:50, 23 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't understand the Unicode coverage section. What do IBM/MS code pages have to do with Unicode? They are separate encoding schemes as far as I know. Does this mean to say that all the characters in the listed code pages are included in the fonts, presumably at Unicode code points? If so, can we change the wording so it says that? I would fix it, but the section is not sourced. Kendall-K1 (talk) 22:14, 24 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Presumably something to do with the fonts these are intended to substitute for having originally been ASCII fonts using the default Western encoding in Windows? Which was largely based on the IBM international codepage? Therefore a demonstration of full compatibility with that, and how the original 8-bit glyph encoding in a document that specifies a "Western" version of one of these fonts (or indeed any of the variant script codepages available for them) maps to the full unicode landscape (which of course is 256x larger), is kind of crucial. 146.199.0.164 (talk) 21:38, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Most commonly used fonts?
Are we entirely sure that Arial, Times NR and Courier New are still that commonly used? The claim would have been correct when I was at school in the mid 1990s, but they don't seem to have been the default for anything much in Windows for about 10 years now, certainly not any program that produces printed or onscreen documents. Tahoma and Verdana came along ages ago, and Calibri etc have been around for a decade. I'm not sure when I last saw a hastily knocked-up sign using 72pt bold of any of the classic 90s trio, but I've seen plenty of last using the modern equivalents.

I think the only time I ever see Courier any more is in edit boxes like this one and I'm not even entirely sure that that's what I'm typing in right now... might be Consolas or something?

That sweeping statement might need some revision therefore – with reference to them being the previous defaults and therefore very widely used, making true open source compatibility with documents that specify them rather difficult without a metrically identical substitute available (much like Arial was itself a substitute for Swiss or Helvetica...). Joined by a comparison with similar format-preserving substitutes for the modern era fonts. 146.199.0.164 (talk) 21:33, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://archive.is/20140115011923/http://pkgs.org/opensuse-12.3/opensuse-oss-i586/liberation2-fonts-2.00.1-2.1.1.noarch.rpm.html to http://pkgs.org/opensuse-12.3/opensuse-oss-i586/liberation2-fonts-2.00.1-2.1.1.noarch.rpm.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20100619073124/http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandriva/2008.0/What's_New to http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandriva/2008.0/What%27s_New
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20100125163536/http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/uploads/9/97/Mandriva-linux-free-2010.0-x86_64.idx to http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/uploads/9/97/Mandriva-linux-free-2010.0-x86_64.idx
 * Added tag to http://cgit.freedesktop.org/ooo-build/ooo-build/tree/patches/dev300/apply?h=ooo-build-3-1-1

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Liberation Script
Yesterday, just out of curiosity, I googled for Liberation Script and to my surprise this font seems do exists:

https://www.cdnfonts.com/liberation-script.font

Is it really created by Steve or somehow authorized by him? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.71.128.106 (talk) 01:57, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

upd: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/a/155348 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.71.138.187 (talk) 11:09, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

Liberation Sans Narrow REMOVED?
Note: 2.00.0 onward releases does not includes Liberation Sans Narrow font due to licensing problems. Please refer to older releases for Liberation Sans Narrow font.

Per the website Liberation Sans Narrow is gone. Anybody know more about this?

-vossman (talk) 00:38, 31 August 2022 (UTC)