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shadowtree 2 days ago

Good - Calibri is not open, badly supported on Linux et al.

HN should rejoice in the US gov using a font that is open and truly cross platform.

chrismorgan 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New, Calibri, Cambria… all of these fonts are proprietary.

But there are open-source metrically-compatible alternatives to all of them, commonly included in Linux distributions and/or office suites like LibreOffice.

Probably the most popular set is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croscore_fonts, with Tinos, Arimo, Cousine, and in the extended set Carlito and Caladea. The former most popular set is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts, with Liberation {Serif, Sans, Mono}.

But a given system is definitely less likely to have a Calibri alternative than a Times New Roman alternative.

Sunspark 2 days ago | parent [-]

The Croscore fonts ARE the Liberation fonts, just renamed.

I keep both for naming compatibility and also because the 1.0 Liberation versions had truetype hinting (2.0 and up did not).

ikamm 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Times New Roman is proprietary as well

dsevil 2 days ago | parent [-]

I think there's clones of it that aren't.

jeroenhd 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Calibri works just fine on my machine. Just download the font using one of the many font packages available in your distro (i.e. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-ms-win11)

I don't think it's included by default but the font itself will just work once you install it.

As for open fonts (can fonts even be truly closed in the first place?), Times New Roman is just as closed and proprietary as Calibri is.

Arodex 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, we got it, you hate accessibility and dyslexic people.