GNOME and Bitstream recently got together to make some Free fonts for OpenSource projects. The effort resulted in the high quality BitstreamVera fontset, which can be downloaded and installed on any system you want.

The set consists of the following TrueType fonts:

Bitstream Vera Serif

A serif font similar to Times.

Bitstream Vera Sans

A very pleasant sans-serif font similar to Verdana/Helvetica.

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono

A gorgeous monospace font slightly similar to Terminal.

Unfortunely at the current version 1.10 the fonts only contain the characters from iso_8859_15(7)/Western Europe charsets, lacking support for characters such as "ā" (A macron, used for example in Māori). Hopefully these will be added soon.

Information about the BitstreamVera fonts and downloads can be found with GNOME's announcement. The wiki uses the BitstreamVera fonts if you have them installed.

Most distributions should have a package for the BitstreamVera fontset. If yours doesn't, see FontNotes for links and howtos on how to install them manually. If you want to check to see if they are installed correctly and how they look on your computer, run xfontsel, select bitstream from the fndry (foundry) dropdown and bitstream vera from the fmly (family) dropdown. For the following distributions, the package is called

DebianLinux

ttf-bitstream-vera (in Testing/sarge and Unstable/sid)

RedHat rawhide

bitstream-vera-fonts

Slackware 9.1

ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10-noarch-2