Penguin
Note: You are viewing an old revision of this page. View the current version.

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" (ā), used for example in Maori) will be added soon.

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

The fonts should be nicely packaged for most distributions, or see our FontNotes page for links and howtos for manually installing fonts. If you use Debian Testing (sarge) or Unstable (sid) you can simply do
apt-get install ttf-bitstream-vera

The RedHat (rawhide) package is named bitstream-vera-fonts.

If you want to check to see if they are installed correctly and how they look on your computer, run "xfontsel", from the foundary (fndry) dropdown select "bitstream" and from the family (fmly) dropdown select on of the "bitstream vera" fonts.

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