Difference between revisions of "Linux Fonts"

Revision as of 22:08, 5 October 2024

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Sans serif fonts on Linux, or I can't tell I from l when they look alike but not exactly like 1. Also the search for a good Slashed zero font on linux is important to a lot of users.

Learn how to use Mint Linux Installing Fonts System-Wide which also applies to Ubuntu and some information to all Linux distributions.

The Ubuntu Font Family emerged around 2010 and the technical font design work and implementation was undertaken by Dalton Maag and released for Ubuntu 10.10. He used software tools such as Fontlab Studio as well as, and sadly, Microsoft Visual Truetype (VTT).

Early Linux users were troubled by learning that there were few fonts available and many were proprietary or public domain. Obviously, proprietary fonts would be legally incompatible with free software. A GPL Font Exception clause was created as part of the evolution of fonts being introduced into and made available for Linux distributions. The Font Exception satisfied the Free Software Foundation’s concerns, and was used by Red Hat in 2007 when it first released its Liberation Fonts.

The Bitstream Vera License granted users “the rights to use, copy, merge, publish, distribute, and/or sell copies of the Font Software” so long as the copyright accompanied any use of the fonts. In addition, no derivative fonts could use the words “Bitstream” or “Vera” in their names and could not be sold alone.

Then later the SIL Font License enabled the rise of the free font movement, making Linux a practical choice for designers and artists. Today, it is the most popular free license for fonts. SIL International is a Christian academic organization and they developed new fonts to promote literacy in under developed countries. Revised in 2007, the SIL Font License went on to become the most popular license for free fonts. Although the requirement that a font using the license cannot be sold alone is technically a violation of the GPL, the requirement is so easy to fulfill that the SIL Font License is generally accepted as a free license.

• TTF - TrueType (TTF) was jointly developed by Apple and Microsoft in the late 1980s as an alternative to Adobe‘s PostScript fonts.
• OTF - OpenType (OTF) was later developed jointly by Microsoft and Adobe in the 1990s as an extension of TrueType. It incorporated support for PostScript font data and introduced new typographic features for advanced typesetting.

Both TTF and OTF are widely supported across mainstream operating systems today including Linux.

FontForge is an open source font editor that allows you to create, edit, and convert font files. It is the best tool for converting between TTF and OTF formats on Linux.

sudo apt install fontforge

What are the most common fonts found on most Linux systems? According to a CodeStyle survey in 2010 the most common Linux fonts on systems were: Century Schoolbook L, URW Chancery L, URW Gothic L, URW Bookman L, Nimbus Mono L, and Lucida Bright.

Fonts and Font Families common to Linux systems

1. Bitstream Vera Fonts
2. DejaVu Fonts
3. GNU Free Fonts
4. Liberation Fonts
5. Linux Libertine and Biolinum Fonts
6. Luxi Fonts
7. Nimbus Fonts
8. Gentium
9. Charis