Font Packages

Optimal Use of Fonts on Linux
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# 4. Font Packages

## 4.1. Bitstream Vera Fonts

Bitstream donated to the open world their Vera set of fonts, which are good quality and include a sans, sans serif and monospace fonts. This fonts are not very well hinted but can be used for desktop widgets, programming, fluent text reading and web surfing. Here is a screen shot:

Figure 11. Bitstream Vera Fonts

At these sizes, these fonts look great, specially with anti-aliasing. But unfortunately their bad hinting can be noted at small sizes.

Bitstream Vera fonts are included by default in all modern Linux distributions.

## 4.2. DejaVu Fonts

The DejaVu fonts are modifications of the Bitstream Vera fonts designed to extend this original for greater coverage of Unicode. It is being included by default in all modern Linux distributions, and everywhere you were thinking to use Bitstream Vera, DejaVu is another option with a more complete Unicode set.

Figure 12. The DejaVu Fonts

## 4.3. Webcore Fonts

The official distribution of these fonts for Linux include tarballs and RPMs for several distributions.

Also known as the Microsoft fonts, these are the best fonts available to be used on the screen. Very well hinted for small sizes makes them perfect for desktop widgets, fluent text, etc.

They are Verdana, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Arial, Trebuchet, Comic Sans, Impact and others. Here is a screen shot of them:

Figure 13. The Webcore Fonts

As we said before, Tahoma and Verdana were designed for the screen, but they are getting overused for many other purpose.

Our objective here is to provide links where you can get good quality RPMs, debs, etc for your distribution. These packages are provided by independent contributors, so if you have the skills to build them for your distribution, please contact us and send the URL for your packages. WE WILL ACCEPT CONTRIBUTIONS.

Packages for distributions:

- Red Hat and Fedora RPMs. This is the orignal package, and it is reported to work in many other distributions.

- Mandrake signed RPMs by Borgnet (Scott Grayban).

- Debian Sarge (currently stable) and Etch (soon to be stable) both contain a package called msttcorefonts which contains the MS core fonts. Most Debian users running a GUI will probably install it.

- Please send us more, such as Slackware and Debian packages.

After installing this font package you'll also note a better rendering of web pages, because professional web designers use to use them for their pages.

Some people say these fonts are free only for persons who have a Microsoft Windows license.

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