Comparison between the Liberation fonts and Arial, Courier New and Times New Roman

A few weeks ago Red Hat released the Liberation typographic family, saying that the fonts would be metrically identical to the famous Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New, distributed by Microsoft. In practice, a document formatted with Arial could be displayed with Liberation Sans without any distortion. Really?

With the new version of GNOME Specimen, a font previewer for GNOME, I decided to test if the Liberation fonts had the same size as the Microsoft ones:

Comparison of the Liberation typographic family (Red Hat) with the Arial, Courier New and Times New Roman fonts (Microsoft).

Indeed, given the same height the Liberation fonts have the same width as their proprietary equivalents. However, the fonts are quite different, for example in weight and x-height. Only Liberation Sans is similar to Arial, which in turn is an imitation of Helvetica. Liberation Mono seemed to be more legible than Courier New, and Liberation Serif, even if as compact as Times New Roman, is more pleasant because of its lightness.

In sum, the Liberation fonts fulfill their task of substituting Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New, whithout losing their own identity. Free software scores again!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 23:16 and is filed under Notícias, Software livre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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4 Responses to “Comparison between the Liberation fonts and Arial, Courier New and Times New Roman”

  1. F Wolff Says:
    June 28th, 2007 am30 04:37

    You might be interested in this comparison that a guy here in South Africa made. It gives a nice view of just how similar it is.

  2. Leonardo Fontenelle Says:
    June 28th, 2007 am30 06:35

    Wow. While the others are more unique, Liberation Sans is _really_ similar to Arial!

  3. Free fonts to replace those from Microsoft | Leonardo Fontenelle Says:
    November 4th, 2007 pm30 13:45

    [...] We have have many free TrueType fonts, such as Bitstream Vera, but Liberation fonts dimensions would be identical to the Microsoft fonts. According to RedHat, a document created with the Microsoft fonts could be displayed without distortion using the Liberation typographic family. The RedHat fonts are distributed under the GPL license with an exception permitting its inclusion in documents distributed under other licenses. (Updated: see the fonts side-by-side.) [...]

  4. kurye Says:
    December 1st, 2008 am31 08:34

    thank you kurye kargo dağıtım hizmetleri moto kurye

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