Liberation is the collective name of four TrueType font families: Liberation Sans, Liberation Sans Narrow, Liberation Serif, and Liberation Mono. These fonts are metrically compatible with the most popular fonts on the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office software package (Monotype Corporation’s Arial, Arial Narrow, Times New Roman and Courier New, respectively), for which Liberation is intended as a free substitute. The fonts are default in LibreOffice. Characteristics Liberation Sans, Liberation Sans Narrow, and Liberation Serif closely match the metrics of Monotype Corporation fonts Arial, Arial Narrow, and Times New Roman, respectively. This means that the letters and symbols width and height between the Liberation fonts and the corresponding Monotype fonts are identical, and the Monotype fonts can be substituted by the corresponding Liberation font without changing the document layout. Liberation Mono is styled closer to Liberation Sans than Monotype’s Courier New, though its metrics match with Courier New. The Liberation fonts are intended as free, open-source replacements of the aforementioned proprietary fonts. Unicode coverage All three fonts supported IBM/Microsoft code pages 437, 737, 775, 850, 852, 855, 857, 858, 860, 861, 863, 865, 866, 869, 1250, 1251, 1252, 1253, 1254, 1257, the Macintosh Character Set (US Roman), and the Windows OEM character set, that is, the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, leaving out many writing systems. Extension to other writing systems was prevented by its unique licensing terms. Since the old fonts were replaced by the Croscore equivalents, expanded Unicode coverage has become possible. History The fonts were developed by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corporation as Ascender Sans and Ascender Serif. A variant of this font family, with the addition of a monospaced font and open-source license, was licensed by Red Hat Inc. as the Liberation font family. Liberation Sans and Liberation Serif derive from Ascender Sans and Ascender Serif respectively; Liberation Mono uses base designs from Ascender Sans and Ascender Uni Duo. The fonts were developed in two stages. The first release of May 2007 was a set of fully usable fonts, but they lacked the full hinting capability. The second release, made available in the beginning of 2008, provides full hinting of the fonts. In April 2010, Oracle Corporation contributed the Liberation Sans Narrow typefaces to the project. They are metrically compatible with the popular Arial Narrow font family. With Liberation Fonts 1.06 the new typefaces were officially released. Distribution Version 2.00.0 or above As