Cantarell

The default font for Gnome for over decade, Cantarell was originally criticized for some of its design choices such as a lack of kerning (the spacing between letters) and a relative lack of international support. However, Cantarell has since addressed these issues to become a popular modern sans serif font, available in regular, italic, and bold weights (Figure 8).

Figure 8: Once criticized for its lack of standard font features, Cantarell has slowly become a leading modern sans serif font.

Droid

Created specifically for Android, Droid is designed to be legible in the small space of a phone screen. This intention also makes Droid ideal for any place where you need legibility in a limited space. In other places, it may look unnecessarily cramped. Droid is available in serif, sans serif, and monospace typefaces, with support for the more common non-European languages (Figure 9).

Figure 9: Droid has the specific niche of being designed for legibility in small spaces, like a phone screen.

Liberation Fonts

Red Hat released the Liberation Fonts at a time when Times Roman, Arial, Helvetica, Helvetica Narrow, and Courier were standard fonts in publishing and business. The Liberation Fonts include a metrical equivalent of each of these standard fonts (i.e., a font that occupies the same space as these standard fonts). Using Liberation fonts, you can design in LibreOffice and set the Liberation fonts to be replaced on machines that use the standard fonts.

Today, publishing and business are less centered on the traditional font standards, so the Liberation fonts are less useful than they once were. Since they are designed for function rather than appearance, there is no strong reason to choose them for themselves. Still, there may be times when they come in handy (Figure 10).

Figure 10: Liberation fonts are a substitute for standard proprietary fonts. From top to bottom: Liberation Serif, Sans Serif, Sans Serif Narrow, and Mono.