Today I discovered that RedHat released a set of fonts under GPL which are approximately metrically equivalent to the most used Microsoft fonts.
Arial ~ Liberation Sans
Times New Roman ~ Liberation Serif
Courier New ~ Liberation Mono
The Liberation fonts are not yet complete (no full hinting, yet), still they look quite good already, in my opinion. The fonts will be complete at the end of this year.
Read more here: RedHat’s announcement
Download the package containing the three truetype fonts here: Download
Thanks to RedHat! 🙂
There is still one thing though: We should have a free font like “Arial Unicode MS”, containing all the characters you can think of… right now I still have to use Arial Unicode MS as fallback substitution, because there are only very few chinese characters in the Liberation fonts.
UPDATE (2007-06-13):
A small sample of the Liberation Sans font, rendered by Qt / KDE with anti-aliasing and full sub-pixel hinting (RGB), hinting style: full:
