GNOME and Bitstream recently got together to make some Free fonts for open source operating systems. They came up with the Bitstream Vera fontset. These can be downloaded and installed on your Operating System (if it be Linux/Windows/MacOS etc) and you'll have the use of some nice, high quality Free fonts.

The set consists of the following TrueType fonts:

• bitstream vera serif, a serif font similar to Times,
• bitstream vera sans, a sans-serif font similar to Arial/Helvatica, and
• bitstream vera sans mono, a monospace font slightly similar to Terminal.

At the moment (version 1.10 of the fonts) they only contain the characters from 8859-1/Western Europe charsets, which is unfortunate. Hopefully support for other characters (such as a macron, used for example in Maori) will be added soon.

Information about the Bitstream Vera fonts and downloads can be found with gnomes announcement: http://www.gnome.org/fonts/

The fonts can be installed on most versions of linux with a bit of twiddling, I imagine over the next few months they'll be intergrated into release (and updates) for most distributions, or see our FontNotes page for links and howtos for installing fonts.

The wiki now (2003-04-30) uses the Bitstream Vera fonts by default (if you have them installed)