A Guide to Open Source Fonts
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).
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).
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).
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