On Sun, 19 Dec 2004 13:52:00 +0800, Wong Kwok-hon <kwokhon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Do the Windows "Times New Romans" ture type font is free and can copy > to linux for use ? In general, yes, any TrueType font can be used under Linux; including Microsoft's fonts. There are two kinds of problems though: 1. Fonts that are specifically designed and hinted for one particular operating system may not appear as high quality under Linux's font renderer engine. This is especially true at very small point sizes. This is typically due to the way that hinting and autohinting is done (another legal hurdle since "hinting" algorithms are somehow patentable). 2. Most fonts require licenses to use, and font foundaries are notoriously legally agressive. If you own a copy of Windows, then it's easy to copy the *.ttf files over to Linux. I can't tell you if this is technically legal, I fell asleep after trying to read the 8,000,000 lines of fine print lawyer-speak EULA's that come with Windows. (MS's lawyers write more lines of "code" than their developers do). If you're doing this on your own systems you're probably okay. But if you plan on distributing them as part of some project/product, you should get a lawyer. At one time Microsoft actually made several of their base fonts available for free download over the Internet with a surprisingly liberal license (not quite "open source", but as close as MS ever gets). However they since have removed the downloads so the legal state of those fonts is less clear nowdays. BTW, you can always try to check on http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ and see if you can find anything. Note that you can also go the other way around. You can take your Linux TrueType fonts and install them into Windows. There's no legal issue there at all. However as many truely free fonts are specifically designed for Linux's rendering engine, they may not look their best under Window's renderer. For free TTF fonts, you can use the Vera family that already comes with Fedora. Or even the Hunky fonts which is just Vera with a lot of extended non-latin characters, http://kdelook.org/content/show.php?content=15063 -- Deron Meranda
