The Linux Libertine Open Fonts Project [LWN.net]

By Forrest Cook
January 2, 2008

The Libertine Open Fonts Project, which first showed up on LWN in May, 2006, is an open source font project. The project's leader is Philipp H. Poll. The Libertine project description states:

Letters and fonts have two charakteristics: On the one hand they are basic elements of communication and fundament of our culture, on the other hand they are cultural goods and artcraft. You are able to see just the first aspect, but when it comes to software youll see copyrights and patents even on the most elementary fonts. Therefore we want to give you a free alternative: This is why we founded the Libertine Open Fonts Project.

The Libertine license information states:

Our fonts are free in the sense of the GPL and OFL. In a nutshell: Changing the font is allowed as long as the derivative work is published under the same license again. Pedantics keep claiming that the embedded use of GPL-fonts in i.e. PDFs requires the free publication of the PDF as well. This, of course, is absolute nonsense, because - to our opinion - the font is not significantly changed by the embedding. To abolish the conflict some members of the FSF have written an addition to the license: the so called Font Exception. Our fonts GPL contains this font exception (since version 2.7). Since version 2.1.9 LinuxLibertine is also licensed under the OFL, which will clarify usability-conflicts.

The Libertine font files are available as both TTF (TrueType) and OTF (OpenType) fonts. The Linux-compatible LaTeX typesetting system supports the Libertine fonts. See the Libertine LaTeX document [PDF] for usage and installation instructions. Libertine includes a wide variety of Font Styles. Numerous languages are supported, and many special characters are available. For a look at some of the LaTeX accessible font characters, see the glyph list document [PDF].

Version 2.7.9 of the Libertine font project was recently announced. This release adds hinting, which allows the fonts to be used with Microsoft Word. Other changes include improved kern pairs for better typography, some minor tweaks and some bug fixes.

The libertine fonts are available for download here. The fonts come in a standard .tgz file which includes all of the font collections as both .ttf and .otf files. The Fontforge source files are also available. Fontforge is an open-source outline font editor.

(Log in to post comments)

Ligatures?

Posted Jan 3, 2008 6:41 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

The Libertine fonts contain some of the most common ligature glyphs, and the OTF files contain
the proper information for programs to use them.  I verified this with Adobe InDesign CS3 on
OS X (Leopard)--the ligatures are definitely substituted properly for 'fi', ,'ffi', 'fl',
'ffl', and 'Th'.  Beyond that I don't know, but those are the most common ones as far as I
know.

I do wish, however, that the small caps variant could be folded into the regular OTF files,
since there is ample room for that feature to be selectable using OpenType.

Ligatures?

Posted Jan 3, 2008 6:41 UTC (Thu) by rpil2 (guest, #49526) [Link]

Pretty much all fonts have ligature glyphs i think, if you use a tex based system you'll get
them rendered automatically.  If you use a word processor, you will get the ugly turd of an
output you deserve, and in particular you're unlikely to get such basic typographic
innvoations as ligatures, hyphenation, sensible line-breaking, etc.

word processors and a person's worth

Posted Jan 6, 2008 1:49 UTC (Sun) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link]

To suggest that everyone who use word processors deserves some likeness of an ugly turd is
insulting; please try not to insult people in public fora.  I suggest s/output you
deserve/output that one has come to expect of such software/.

(It may be helpful to consider what your response would be if one were to suggest that anyone
who uses a web browser whose form editor doesn't provide the innvoation of spell checking will
get the ugly turd output they deserve: many of the possible responses apply equally to users
of word processors.  In any case, typical LaTeX output can hardly be described as universally
less ugly than typical word processor output, even if it does some things like mathematical
formulæ really well.)

Incidentally, readers that want to use word processors and yet get the typographic features
that the poster lists might try using LyX, possibly via export/import from a word-processor
document.

Ligatures?

Posted Jan 3, 2008 13:41 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Many modern fonts like DejaVu or Libertine have ligatures. Older fonts didn't, as evidenced by
the numerous bugs ligature addition to DejaVu triggered in apps (the most infamous being in
Firefox, that will only be completely fixed for Firefox 3).

Nevertheless Microsoft and Apple invested massively in font tech and FLOSS stacks are still
playing catch-up. OpenOffice.org does not work with the very common OTF format (PS successor),
OpenType features like the ability to declare that parts of a font has a different metrics are
not implemented in FLOSS text layouters (and OpenType features can be found both in TTF and
OTF fonts), etc. All this stuff is required for correct support of non-latin scripts (and
sometimes even latin script nice-to-haves).

There is certainly a lot of interesting work to do on fonts support for people looking for a
coding opportunity.

A non-exhaustive issue list is there
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/Dev

Ligatures?

Posted Jan 13, 2008 6:11 UTC (Sun) by gdamjan (guest, #33634) [Link]

From what I've seen Qt 4.3 renders ligatures. At least psi-0.11 does that.