Liberation Font

The Liberation Fonts project aims to preserve document-layout compatibility with Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New. Its official contributor record identifies Steve Matteson and Ascender as the original design background, with Red Hat maintaining the project. That functional compatibility goal is central to understanding the collection.

Read the publisher’s family page for the source account and the edition currently offered. Keep a family name distinct from its particular release, width or optical branch.

Metric compatibility concerns the measurements used to fit text in a layout. It does not mean the outlines of every letter are identical, or guarantee that every document will remain unchanged under different software and settings. Identify the particular Liberation resource, version and character coverage before selecting a replacement.

Use the original publisher specimen to inspect those features. An alternative can share a broad role without having the same letter shapes, metrics or character coverage.

Compare a copy of the actual document with the original layout, checking page breaks, headings, tables and italic emphasis. Preserve size, line spacing and margins during the comparison. For an independent design comparison, use the editable fonts below; they are not asserted to be metric-compatible substitutes.

For independent comparisons, try Source Sans 3 and Source Serif 4. Use the same wording and approximate output size. The related style guide provides broader design context.

Use Liberation Fonts project to try the original and investigate the files, styles and terms for your intended workflow. This site does not distribute or serve Liberation font software.

The editable alternatives here have their own source profiles and included licenses. For the difference between a font file and copied characters, read Unicode text versus fonts.