Metric-compatible fonts

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The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Reason: Visual similarity is not the same as metric compatibility. For instance, FreeSerif is visually similar to Times New Roman, but metrically different. Same for TeX Gyre Termes, but differences are very minor. (Discuss in Talk:Metric-compatible fonts)

Metric-compatible fonts are fonts that match the metrics (i.e. glyph dimensions) of another font (often generics such as Helvetica, Times or Courier). Due to their matching metrics, replacing a font with a metric-compatible alternative does not change the formatting of the document or a web page. Such fonts are often developed for FOSS systems to display pages correctly.

List of metric-compatible fonts

In the following table, commonly-specified families are shown in bold. This table is roughly based on fontconfig's 30-metric-aliases.conf and Wikipedia pages for individual fonts.

"Core fonts for the web" compatibilities
PostScript URW GUST GNU Microsoft Liberation CrOS StarOffice
Helvetica Nimbus Sans, A030 TeX Gyre Heros FreeSans Arial Liberation Sans Arimo Albany
Times Nimbus Roman TeX Gyre Termes FreeSerif Times New Roman Liberation Serif Tinos Thorndale
Courier Nimbus Mono TeX Gyre Cursor FreeMono Courier New Liberation Mono Cousine Cumberland
Helvetica Condensed Nimbus Sans Narrow TeX Gyre Heros Cn Arial Narrow Liberation Sans Narrow
Georgia Gelasio
Wingdings (PS3) URWDings, New Dingbats Wingdings
Microsoft Office fonts
Microsoft CrOS
Cambria Caladea
Calibri Carlito
Symbol SymbolNeu
Microsoft UI fonts
Microsoft FOSS
Segoe UI Selawik
Tahoma Wine Tahoma
Fonts with 1884÷2048em top, 514÷2048em bottom, 1126÷2048em width
Microsoft Type Design
Consolas DMCA Sans Serif
Fonts with 8×16 glyphs and 16×16 glyphs
GNU Type Design
Unifont Kissinger 2
Other PostScript core families
PostScript URW GUST Windows
ITC Avant Garde Gothic URW Gothic TeX Gyre Adventor Century Gothic
ITC Bookman Bookman URW TeX Gyre Bonum Bookman Old Style
ITC Zapf Chancery Chancery URW, Z003 TeX Gyre Chorus Monotype Corsiva
Palatino Palladio URW, P052 TeX Gyre Pagella Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua
New Century Schoolbook Century SchoolBook URW, C059 TeX Gyre Schola Century Schoolbook
ITC Zapf Dingbats Dingbats, D050000L
PostScript 3 Fonts
PostScript URW
Optima URW Classico
Antique Olive Antique Olive
Univers URW Classic Sans, U001
Clarendon Bold Condensed Clarendon URW Bold Condensed, C011 Bold Condensed
Coronet Coronet
Letter Gothic Letter Gothic
Marigold Mauritius
Albertus Algiers, A028
Garamond Garamond No. 8

Generic Families

PostScript

The PostScript language defines 35 core fonts in PostScript 2. URW released open-source versions/clones of these 35 fonts for w:ghostscript, available as gsfonts. Projects including GUST's TeX Gyre and GNU FreeFont release enhanced versions of these fonts.

PostScript 3 defines an additional 101 fonts, many of which are made available by URW under the AFPL in GhostPDL. The AFPL bars commercial use. Many of the dual font names are caused by a batch update.

Garamond

URW's Garamond No.8 only provides one optical size (8pt). You may use EB Garamond for more OpenType features, including the 12pt size. It is, however, not guaranteed to be metric-identical.

Microsoft

Microsoft bundles a number of fonts with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. While some of these fonts are just a cheaper version (or look-alike) of corresponding PostScript families, Cambria and Calibri (default font since MS Office 2007) are independent from other families. Microsoft used to provide many core fonts in its Core fonts for the Web project. Although this project is later unavailable on Microsoft's site, the license terms that allow these fonts to be distributed from third-party sites make packages like ttf-ms-fontsAUR possible. See also Microsoft fonts.

Prior to the introduction of Arial and Times New Roman, Microsoft used two bitmap fonts called Helv and Tms Rmn in Windows 1.0, each being unlicensed imitations of better-known fonts already covered here. They were later renamed MS Sans Serif and MS Serif starting with Windows 3.1, and MS Sans Serif was eventually vectorized into "Microsoft Sans Serif". Documents using these fonts are rare, but user interfaces that use Microsoft Sans Serif can occasionally be found in Mono libgdiplus applications. It is generally safe to assume these fonts are metric-compatible with Helvetica and Times when trying to replace them.

Metric-compatible font projects

TeX Gyre

TeX Gyre (tex-gyre-fonts) is a remake and extension of the 35 base PostScript fonts distributed with Ghostscript 4.00. The project provides TeX support and also the cross-platform OpenType format of the fonts. A related project, TeX Gyre Math, provides corresponding mathematical OpenType fonts.

GNU FreeFont

GNU FreeFont (gnu-free-fonts) is an outline family intended to cover as much of the Universal Character Set as possible. Most of the Latin characters are from URW (Nimbus) fonts. This set of fonts is released under GPL v3+ + FE.

Liberation

Liberation fonts provides four families Liberation Sans, Liberation Serif, and Liberation Mono, intended to be metric-compatible with common Microsoft Windows fonts. Since version 2.0.0, this set of fonts is released under SIL OFL, and is based on #Chrome OS core fonts. They are available as ttf-liberation.

Older, GPL-licensed versions of this font is based on Ascender Corporation's fonts, which is licensed by Red Hat, Inc. These versions of Liberation also includes Liberation Sans Narrow, which corresponds to Arial Narrow. This one font is available as ttf-liberation-sans-narrowAUR.

Ume

Ume Fonts (Japanese) (ttf-umeAUR) is a font projects which provides metric-compatible fonts with MS Japanese fonts, such as: Ume Gothic (MS Gothic), Ume UI Gothic (MS UI Gothic), Ume P Gothic (MS PGothic), ...

Google

Google provides a high number of fonts, including different metric-compatible font families.

Gelasio[dead link 2024-01-13 ⓘ] (ttf-gelasio-ibAUR), the Google alternative for Georgia, can be found on FontLibrary under SIL OFL.

Chrome OS

Google ships open-source metric-compatible fonts with its operating system, Chrome OS, under the Apache License 2.0. CrOS core (croscore, ttf-croscore) is a collection of Arimo (sans), Tinos (serif) and Cousine (mono), also licensed from Ascender Corporation. A set of extra fonts, CrOS extra (crosextra) provides Carlito (ttf-carlito) and Caladea (ttf-caladea) to match default fonts for Microsoft Word.

Since glyph mappings from Symbol are usually implemented in browsers, Google no longer ships SymbolNeu in croscore > 1.23.0. You can get this font from croscorefonts-1.23.0.tar.gz.

Noto

Google's Noto Fonts are available via noto-fonts. They are licensed under SIL OFL. Noto Fonts are designed to supplement glyph coverage for Roboto (ttf-roboto), the standard typeface for Android, and are vertically (i.e. same line height for the same font size) metric-compatible with Roboto.

Other metric-compatible fonts

DMCA Sans Serif

DMCA Sans Serif (ttf-dmcasansserifAUR) is a general purpose sans serif alternative to Microsoft's Consolas, it uses the same metric (1884/2048 top, 514/2048 bottom, 1126/2048 width) and is in the public domain. Version 9.0 has 3309 characters, which is the Subset3+ character set.

Kissinger 2

Kissinger 2 is a public domain competitor of Unifont. Unlike Unifont, Kissinger 2 is split into separate halfwidth (8×16) and fullwidth (16×16) fonts, with some characters having glyphs in both widths. Version dev4 has 8450 halfwidth characters, 14724 fullwidth characters, 21911 total, and 1263 overlap, however, users can contribute glyphs by the method described in the official website.

Selawik

Selawik (ttf-selawikAUR) is Microsoft's open-source alternative to its Segoe UI font. Unfortunately it does not match Segoe UI's kerning parameters. It was developed for use in the WinJS framework, which is now abandoned.

Wine Tahoma

The Wine project developed a metric-compatible font to replace Microsoft's Tahoma, available as ttf-tahomaAUR. Its name in TTF data is simply "Tahoma", so there is no configuration needed.

Example configuration

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Reason: We should not talk about overriding default fonts in a metric-compatible font page. All we should do is tell people to prepend binding="same" some family names for good fallbacks (preferably using the shorthand <alias>...<accept>), not completely replace the original with strong-arm assignments. (Discuss in Talk:Metric-compatible fonts)

For font consistency, all applications should be set to use the serif, sans-serif, and monospace aliases, which are mapped to particular fonts by fontconfig. Font configuration#Set default or fallback fonts explains two ways to achieve the configuration, both are covered with an example for metric-compatible fonts below.

Example for binding method

The following example configuration uses the #Liberation fonts. 

/etc/fonts/local.conf
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>serif</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="same"><string>Liberation Serif</string></edit>
    </match>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>sans-serif</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="same"><string>Liberation Sans</string></edit>
    </match>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>monospace</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="same"><string>Liberation Mono</string></edit>
    </match>
</fontconfig>

Example for prefer method

The following example configuration uses the #Chrome OS fonts, adding additional aliases for other fonts frequently required to refer. 

/etc/fonts/local.conf
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
 
  <!-- Prefer fonts for generics -->
  <alias>
    <family>serif</family>
    <prefer><family>Tinos</family></prefer>
  </alias>
  <alias>
    <family>sans-serif</family>
    <prefer><family>Arimo</family></prefer>
  </alias>
  <alias>
    <family>sans</family>
    <prefer><family>Arimo</family></prefer>
  </alias>
  <alias>
    <family>monospace</family>
    <prefer><family>Cousine</family></prefer>
  </alias>
   
  <!-- Map specific families to CrOS ones -->
  <match>
    <test name="family"><string>Arial</string></test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
      <string>Arimo</string>
    </edit>
  </match>
  <match>
    <test name="family"><string>Helvetica</string></test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
      <string>Arimo</string>
    </edit>
  </match>
  <match>
    <test name="family"><string>Times</string></test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
      <string>Tinos</string>
    </edit>
  </match>
  <match>
    <test name="family"><string>Times New Roman</string></test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
      <string>Tinos</string>
    </edit>
  </match>
  <match>
    <test name="family"><string>Courier</string></test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
      <string>Cousine</string>
    </edit>
  </match>
  <match>
    <test name="family"><string>Courier New</string></test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
      <string>Cousine</string>
    </edit>
  </match>
  <match>
    <test name="family"><string>Calibri</string></test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
      <string>Carlito</string>
    </edit>
  </match>
  <match>
    <test name="family"><string>Cambria</string></test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
      <string>Caladea</string>
    </edit>
  </match> 
</fontconfig>

See also