Linux fonts (mostly for X11)

Important typeface collections

base X11 bitmaps fonts

These include bitmap versions of the Adobe 14, some terminal fonts, and some utility fonts, usually in a number of common sizes at 100dpi and 75 dpi. Since they have been hand tuned, they usually look best on screens, and render most quickly and reliably. Recent versions incorporate the -misc-fixed- UCS extended fonts which are very useful.

Adobe 14

• Courier (medium, oblique, bold, bold oblique)
• Helvetica® (medium, oblique, bold, bold oblique)
• Symbol
• Times® (roman, italic, bold, bold italic)
• ITC Zapf Dingbats™

Adobe 35

• ITC Avant Garde Gothic® (book, oblique, demi, demi oblique)
• ITC Bookman® (light, italic, demi, demi italic)
• Courier (medium, oblique, bold, bold oblique)
• Helvetica® (medium, oblique, bold, bold oblique)
• Helvetica Narrow (medium, oblique, bold, bold oblique)
• New Century Schoolbook (roman, italic, bold, bold italic)
• Palatino® (medium, italic, bold italic)
• Symbol
• Times® (roman, italic, bold, bold italic)
• ITC Zapf Chancery® (italic)
• ITC Zapf Dingbats™

Gyre

The Tex Gyre family is designed to replaced the classic Adobe set:

It is an extensive remake and extension of the freely available 35 base PostScript fonts distributed with Ghostscript ver. 4.00. The important aspect of the project is providing not only the support for TeX but also the cross-platform OpenType format of the fonts.

These are the typeface that might be considered equivalent:

TeX Gyre	URW	Adobe etc.
Adventor	URW Gothic L	Avant Garde Gothic
Bonum	URW Bookman L	Bookman
Cursor	Nimbus Mono PS, Nimbus Mono L	Courier
Heros	Nimbus Sans L	Helvetica
Schola	C052, Century Schoolbook L	New Century Schoolbook
Pagella	P052, URW Palladio L	Palatino
Termes	Nimbus Roman No9 L	Times
Chorus	Z003, URW Chancery L	Zapf Chancery

Many distributions have configuration files for FontConfig (from FreeDesktop and Artifex) with suitable aliases.

URW Type1

The URW++ foundry has contributed a full set of Type1 fonts (Artifex, CTAN) similar to the classic Adobe set, and they are bundled with GhostScript or with the sample X11 implementation or with most TeX/LaTeX distributions.

Equivalences

URW	Adobe etc.
URW Gothic L	Avant Garde
URW Bookman L	Bookman
Nimbus Mono PS, Nimbus Mono L	Courier
Nimbus Sans L	Helvetica
C059, Century Schoolbook L	New Century Schoolbook
P052, URW Palladio L	Palatino
Standard Symbols PS	Symbol
Nimbus Roman No9 L	Times
Z003, URW Chancery L	Zapf Chancery
D05000L, Dingbats	Zapf Dingbats

Many distributions have configuration files for FontConfig (from Artifex) with suitable aliases.

Java

• Lucida Bright
• Lucida Sans
• Lucida TypeWriter

HP PCL 45

• Albertus® (medium, extra bold)
• Antique Olive™ (medium, italic, bold)
• Clarendon™ Condensed
• Coronet™
• Courier (medium, italic, bold, bold italic)
• Garamond™ Antiqua
• Garamond Halbfett Kursive
• Letter Gothic™ (medium, italic, bold)
• Marigold™
• CG Omega™ (medium, italic, bold, bold italic)
• CG Times™ (medium, italic, bold, bold italic)
• Univers® medium (medium, italic)
• Univers Bold (bold, bold italic)
• Univers Condensed (medium, italic, bold, bold italic)
• Arial® (medium, italic, bold, bold italic)
• Times New Roman® (medium, italic, bold, bold italic)
• Symbol
• Wingdings

Computer Modern

Computer Modern is a group of typefaces specified in MetaFont for T_eX. They have been converted in different ways to other formats like Type 1 and TrueType a few times. The main difficulties have been that by default T_eX uses a particularly obsolete character set, and hinting.
Fortunately here are now some quality conversions to more common character sets and formats; the format converted to is usually Type 1, for which fortunately recently the FreeType rasterizer has been notably improved. Some of the packages are:

• cm-lgc.
• cm-unicode.
• Latin Modern.

Important typefaces

Unrestricted availability:

X11 Helvetica

There are quite a few variants of Helvetica, often but not always with different names, and as a rule they are quite suitable for screen use, in part because of the lack of serifs, in part because it is a typeface that lends itself well to small bitmaps.
The X bitmap version is particularly legible. The Arial font is similar to Helvetica, and allegedly it has the same metrics as the Adobe Helvetica typeface.
X11 has bitmap fonts for Adobe Helvetica and Nimbus Sans.

X11 Times Roman

There are endless variants of the Times font. X11 has bitmap fonts for Adobe Times and Type 1 fonts for Nimbus Roman No9.

X11 Courier

There are endless variants of Courier. But lots lots more. Usually it is the best monospaced font for a few reasons:

• It is usually available in both roman and bold with exactly the same metrics, in particular the X bitmap version.
• The bitmap and some other versions usually are hand tweaked for low resolutions.
• Some of its variants are fairly compact, in particular in the vertical dimension, which means they are nice for editing source code.

X11 has bitmaps fonts for Adobe Courier and Type 1 fonts for IBM and Bitstream Courier and Nimbus Mono.

Microsoft Web

The Microsoft web core fonts are a set of rather bland but quite legible and heavily hinted Truetype fonts. They come with a peculiar but liberal license: they are free of charge and can be freely distributed, but only by offering them for download, and with no modifications to their packaging. The typeface names are:

• Arial
• Arial Black
• Andale Mono
• Comic Sans MS
• Courier New
• Georgia
• Impact
• Times New Roman
• Trebuchet MS
• Verdana
• Webdings

CrOSCore, CrOSExtra, Gelasio, DMCA Sans Serif

CrOSCore typefaces are derived from the Liberation typefaces (thus metric compatible with the 3 most common Microsoft fonts) and are supposed to be the Chrome OS core fonts, Arimo, Cousine and Tinos:

CrOSCore	Liberation	Microsoft Web fonts
Arimo	Liberation Sans	Arial
Cousine	Liberation Mono	Courier New
Gelasio	n.a.	Georgia
Tinos	Liberation Serif	Times New Roman

The CrOSExtra and DMCA Serif extension contains Carlito (derived from Lato) and Caladea (derived from Cambo) and DMCA Sans Serif complements them:

CrOSExtra	Microsoft ClearType
Carlito	Calibri
Caladea	Cambria
DMCA Sans Serif	Consolas

They do not have heavy hints.

Liberation

Liberation fonts are similar to and metric compatible with the 3 most common Microsoft typefaces Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New, but not with the corresponding Adobe typefaces (Helvetica, Times Roman, Courier).
Recent versions are somewhat heavy hinted and work well with FontConfig "slight" antialiasing.

Microsoft ClearType

The Microsoft ClearType fonts are a set of rather bland fonts meant to be used with ClearType style autohinters replacing in some sense the Microsoft Web Fonts. The typeface names are:

ClearType	Similar
Calibri	Carlito
Cambria	Caladea
Candara	n.a.
Consolas	DMCA Sans Serif
Constantia	n.a.
Corbel	n.a.

They are not freely usable, except for document display under MS-Windows. They can be purchased however from Ascender.

DejaVu

DejaVu is a derivative of Bitstream Vera, with many extensions and some more hinting. They have several weights and extensive character sets.
They have heavy hints.

Ubuntu

The Ubuntu fonts have a distinctive, pleasantly semi-rounded flavour. They don't have a serif variant, but several weights and an extensive character set. They are heavy hinted.
Note: there has been a redesign of the Ubuntu fonts in versions since version 0.862 (March 2023) (which are part of Ubuntu versions since 23.04 "Lunar") where their shapes are generally thinner and and monospace font is a bit bigger. I think that they look better but some other people prefer the thicker and smaller older version.

Droid

Droid are fonts created for mobile phones running the Android platform, but they are platform independent and freeware. They have been incorporated into the Google Web Fonts. They have an extensive character set, but the monospaced variant has only the regular style.
They have some heavy hinting.

Lato

Lato are fonts created for mobile phones running the Android platform, but they are platform independent and freeware. They have been incorporated into the Google Web Fonts which supercede them.

Noto

Noto are fonts created for the web to include all UNICODE characters, and therefore they come as different typefaces for each major subset of UNICODE. These too are part of the Google Web Fonts collection. They have a very large character set in sans, a large one in serif, and no monospaced variant.
They have some heavy hints.

GNU free

A set of fonts that are somewhat diverse but have a rather large character set, in particular mathematical.

IBM Plex

Well designed typeface family from IBM in Sans, Serif, Mono, and Sans Condensed, both bold and italics variants.

Antykwa Torunska

Very elegant font from Poland, with a good character set and nice set of variants.

Non Latin with Latin subset

• Greek Magenta set.
• Russian t1-teams.
• Russian t1-cyrillic.
• Uyghur UKIJ Tuz have both Latin and Cyrillic characters in addition to Arabic ones for Uyghur, in a wide variety of typefaces.

Somewhat restricted:

StarOffice and LibreOffice

StarOffice and OpenOffice used to be bundled with a set of Type1 and later TrueType fonts which are similar to the classic Adobe 35 font set, called Arioso (Zapf Calligraphic), Chevara, ChevaraOutline, Conga, Helmet (Helvetica) Helmet Condensed (Helvetica Condensed), StarBats (Zapf Dingbats), StarMath (Symbol), Timmons (Times). This set was arranged by Sun Microsystems when it was the owner of StarOffice.
Currently LibreOffice bundles the Biolinum, CrOSExtra, DejaVu, Gentium, Liberation, Libertine, Open Sans, PT Serif, Source Pro typefaces.

B&H Lucida and Luxi

Lucida and Luxi are similar typefaces, designed by B&H, and they are available free of charge by being bundled with Sun's Java implementation. Lucida is also included in PCF format with the X sample implementation. The scalable versions are not very well hinted (if at all).

Agfa Monotype Thorndale, Albany and Cumberland

These fonts are proprietary versions of Times (Thorndale), Helvetica (Albany) and Courier (Cumberland), specially optimized for display on mobile phones, PDAs and other low DPI screens; they are included with SUSE 9.3 Pro and were included with StarOffice.

Important fixed width typefaces

As part of other typeface sets there are Courier, Cousine, Courier New, Gyre Cursor, DejaVu Sans Mono, Droid Sans Mono, Noto Sans Mono, Plex Mono, Ubuntu Mono, Free Mono, but there arer also some specialize monospace only typeface sets:

mononoki

mononoki is a nice fixed-width only typeface for programming.

Source Sans, Serif, Code Pro

The Source Sans Pro, Source Serif Pro, Source Code Pro (and a few others for non-latin scripts) typefaces by Adobe are distributed under a free software license. They have a wide character coverage, and a large number of weight variants, including the monospaced typeface. They do not have heavy hints.

Cascadia Code

Well designed typeface family from IBM in Sans, Serif, Mono, and Sans Condensed, both bold and italics variants.

Intel One Mono

Well designed fixed-width typeface from Intel with both bold and italics variants.

Important pseudo typefaces

There are first some pseudo font families, generic typeface names which are as a rule mapped to an actual typeface name:

Java

• Serif
• SansSerif
• Monospaced
• Dialog (form captions)
• DialogInput (form fields)

CSS2

• serif
• sans-serif
• monospace
• cursive (handwritten)
• fantasy (decorative)

Fontconfig

The generic Fontconfig names are a subset of the CSS2 ones:

• serif
• sans-serif
• monospace

As a special case sans serif is usually taken as a synonym of sans-serif. Xft1 used similar names which are obsolete:

• serif
• sans
• mono

KDE

In $KDEHOME/share/config/kdeglobals:

• font
• menuFont
• taskbarFont
• toolBarFont
• activeFont(active window)

In $KDEHOME/share/config/kdesktoprc:

• StandardFont (desktop icons)

FreeType2

The FreeType project started with the goal of developing a TrueType rasterizer, but is now extended to be a fully general font library supporting all the most important source font formats, in particular PCF, BDF, TrueType, Type1 and OpenType. In general the results are of fairly good quality.

FreeType2 is used inside several renderers, including the X module freetype, and some X font servers.

X11 bitmap

X11 bitmap fonts exist in a source format, BDF, and can be compiled into a much more efficient binary format, PCF, which is host dependent.

Almost only the fonts bundled with the sample X implementation are available in X11 bitmap format. These are of very high quality, as they have been hand tuned at all available pixel sizes, and include the classic Adobe font set plus several other popular fonts.

These fonts can be rendered (very simply, as they are already bitmaps) by the bitmap module of the X11 server, they can be served by the X11 font server, and they can also be rendered by the FreeType2 library which means they are available under Fontconfig and most other font systems too.

X11 Type 1

The X11 Type 1 renderer in the module type1 and included in the xfs font server almost always produces results that are not as good as those of FreeType2, which also can render Type1 fonts.

t1lib

The t1lib library turns Type1 fonts into bitmaps.

Ghostscript Type 1 and Type 3

GhostScript is a fairly complete PostScript interpreter, so it needs a font engine. It used to have its own for Type1 and Type3 fonts, but it now mostly uses FreeType2 so it can also handle TrueType fonts.

X11 server modules

X11 module bitmap

This module only handles PCF fonts, and has two important limitations in most X implementations until at least XFree86 4.4 and Xorg 6.8.2:

• It cannot be disabled.
• It forces the font DPI to either 100 or 75 if specified as 0 (screen resolution).

X11 module type1

This module contains the old Type 1 rasterizer, like the xfs font server, and generally rasterizes Type 1 fonts less well than the FreeType2 Type1 rasterizer contained in the freetype module.

X11 module freetype

This module renders using the FreeType2 library and can handle X11 bitmap fonts, TrueType fonts and Type 1 fonts. In practice it is the only module that should be specified, unless the xtt module is preferred for Asian fonts.

X11 module xtt

This module contains the FreeType2 font library like the freetype module, but with additional logic for the handling of large Asian fonts with specific character mappings.

X11 font servers

X11 standard font server xfs

X11 font server xfstt

X11 font server xfs-tt

X11 font server xfsft

Obsolete in XFree86 release 4.x and later ones.

Resolution independent XLFD font specification

It is very useful to be able to specify X11 fonts in a form that is independent of the actual monitor DPI.

Unfortunately many (including myself until recently) think erroneously that this is done by using * as the specification for the DPI fields in the XLFD.

This is incorrect, because a * in the XLFD only filters/matches XLFDs, does not in itself mean whatever is the screen resolution.

In practice, this means that the actual resolution selected by * depends on the order of directories in the font path: because the selected font will be the first of all those that match, and these are usually returned in the order in which the corresponding font directories are listed in the font path and in the font catalog files (fonts.dir, fonts.aliases).

The correct way to specify the current screen resolution is to use 0 as the DPI in the XLFD. But this does not work with :unscaled bitmaps fonts, because these only strictly match the available, explicitly declared, DPIs. However, it works even with bitmap fonts if one does not specify :unscaled, and since an unscaled font is preferred if it is close, this will usually work.

It usually is a good idea to play it safe, and list each bitmap font directory twice, first with :unscaled and then without, and then list the scalable fonts.

With this order the unscaled bitmap font paths, which have the best on screen quality, will be preferred, but the 0 DPI specifier will then match the right DPI in the scalable bitmaps font paths, and then the outline fonts will be matched if no suitable bitmap font is available, for example:

    FontPath 	"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/encodings"

    FontPath 	"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled"
    FontPath 	"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled"
    FontPath 	"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled"

    FontPath 	"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc"
    FontPath 	"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi"
    FontPath 	"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"

    FontPath 	"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
    FontPath 	"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType"

Unfortunately there is an entertaining bit of code in the dix/dixfonts.c, procedure GetClientResolutions:

/*
 * XXX - we'll want this as long as bitmap instances are prevalent
 * so that we can match them from scalable fonts
 */
if (res.x_resolution < 88)
    res.x_resolution = 75;
else
    res.x_resolution = 100;

It effect is to force the font DPI to either 75 or 100 depending on the screen resolution, if it has been specified as 0. Too bad for those who have screens with a different DPI.

You can test font rendering with xterm for fixed-width fonts:

xterm -xrm '*.VT100.renderFont: true' -fn \
  '-*-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-*-*-m-*-iso10646-1'

You can use xedit for variable-width fonts:

xedit -xrm '*.font: -*-times-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-*-*-p-*-iso10646-1'

Xft 1.x fonts

These are obsolete, pray that you never need to deal with this font system.

Xft 2/Fontconfig fonts (20240616)

Fontconfig uses FreeType2 to render glyphs from fonts, and its main role is as a font-file finding wrapper to FreeType2. Its main rendering options are a simplified version of the FreeType2 fonts:

Hinting

Hinting means adjusting the shape of rendered fonts to look better on low density displays. There are three types of hinting:

• Automatic hinting which can be applied to any outline font.
• Font type specific hinting.
• Font file hinting if the font family allows each font file to have its own hinting program, as in TrueType. Fairly few fonts are have heavy hints with their own hinting programs, as these are very time consuming to write.

Antialiasing

This renders glyph with smooth edges instead of jagged black-and-white edges, reduces glyph sharpness by making those edges fuzzy, and there are four types:

• Slight grayscale antialiasing uses shades of grey to render glyph edges, makes small adjustments, and works only in the Y dimensions.
• Medium or heavy grayscale antialiasing uses shades of grey to render glyph edges, can change significantly the appearance of glyphs, and can work in both X and Y dimensions.
• RGB antialiasing uses shades or colors to renders glyph edges, taking advantage of LCD pixels having three differently colored subpixels. This usually results in very noticeable coloring.
• RGB filtered antialiasing is the same as RGB antialiasing but also applies a filter that reduces the visual impact of the coloring.

The rendering is controlled by some main parameters with non obvious details:

• hinting: boolean. If false disables all types of hinting and the results usually are pretty bad, even if antialiasing hides that at the price of extra glyph fuzzyness.
• Only if hinting is true:
  • hintstyle: scalar.
    • hintnone is the same as setting hinting to false.
    • hintslight activates the autohinter in "slight" mode (best for modern fonts designed for ClearType style renderers) which usually only hints in the vertical direction.
    • hintmedium and hintheavy activate the font file specific hinter if available, else allow hinting in both vertical and horizontal directions. Usually there is little difference between the two, but sometimes hintfull gives slightly sharper results at the expense of more glyph deformation.
  • autohint: boolean. The Type1 and OpenType fonts are not affected as there are no font file specific hinting programs. The result is often quite different from the autohinter as font file specific programs are quite strong, but better for low resolution displays.
• antialias: boolean. If false all antialiasing is disabled, and the glyphs will be black-and-white.
• Only if antialias is true:
  • rgba: scalar. If none antialiasing will be greyscale, if rgb, bgr, vrgb, vbgr edges will be colored assuming each pixel has that subpixel layout. Virtually all displays are rgb.
  • Only if antialias is true and rgba is not none:
    • lcdfilter: scalar.
      • lcdnone: no color filtering, and usually the output looks not good.
      • lcdlight: beveled 5-tap color filtering, and usually the result is good, but practically the same as rgba being none at DPIs 120-130 and higher.
      • lcddefault: boxy 3-tap color filtering, and usually the result is good, but practically the same as rgba being none at DPIs 120-130 and higher.

A good way to test the parameters is to use recent versions of xterm with Fontconfig, specially for fixed-width fonts:

xterm -xrm '*.VT100.renderFont: true' -fa 'noto mono:size=11:dpi=120:hinting=1:autohint=0:hintstyle=hintslight:antialias=1:rgba=rgb:lcdfilter=lcdlight'

Console

TBD

GhostScript

GhostScript uses a completely different font system from all other applications, based on Fontmap font lists.

TBC

Sun Java (091114)

The Sun Java implementation for GNU/Linux, uses FreeType as of 1.60, and comes with its own set of fonts.

It does not use FontConfig, so it has its own Java properties to control font rendering of which the most obvious ones are those for setting anti-aliasing, which are swing.aatext for version 1.5 and for 1.6 awt.useSystemAAFontSettings, which is analogous to the various options FontConfig uses to specify whether and how to antialias glyphs.

Thwere is a fairly good font display and test utility called Font2DTest which is usually at $JAVA_HOME/demo/jfc/Font2DTest/.

There is a FAQ for 1.6.0 font handling.

TBD

T_eX: xdvi, dvips, ...

TBD

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is an integrated suite of office tools, including a word processor. When running under Linux it uses its own font system, currently based around the FreeType2 font rasterizer.

As written in the Dropline FAQ OpenOffice.org uses by default Fontconfig/XFt2, but uses an old version of the FreeType2 libraries.

You can force it to use a new version by using LD_PRELOAD.

This package can also be configured to use a set of per-user extra fonts in the user/font/ directory in its per-user installation directory.

TBC

DeFoMa

DeFoMa is not a mere font system, but a meta-font system, in that it can be used to configure a number of font systems it manages.

TBC