Fonts are like candies: you can never get enough of them. So if you are getting tired of the fonts that come with your system, here is a hand-picked collection of a few open source fonts that deserve a closer look.

The Liberation fonts are designed as drop-in replacements for the widely-used proprietary fonts like Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, Courier New, etc. The Liberation font pack consists of three sets: Sans (a substitute for Arial, Albany, and Helvetica), Serif (a substitute for Times New Roman) and Mono (a substitute for Courier New, Cumberland, and Courier).

The SIL organization offers an impressive collection of fonts released under the Open Font License. Here you will find fonts designed for specific purposes (e.g., the Antika font is designed especially for literacy education) and specific languages (e.g., Arabic Script Unicode fonts) as well as all-around high-quality fonts like Gentium and Charis.

If you need a serif font that looks every bit as good as Times New Roman, try the Linux Libertine font family. It comes in the regular, italic, bold, bold italic, and small caps styles.

The MgOpen typeface collection offers four font families: MgOpenCanonica (similar to Times Roman), MgOpenCosmetica (similar to Optima), MgOpenModata, and MgOpenModerna (similar to Helvetica). Each font contains four styles: regular, italic, bold, and bold italic.

Arev is a nice sans serif font which can come in handy when you work with languages based on non-Latin alphabets. Since the font provides extensive support for diacritical signs, it’s also suitable for use with “diacritic-heavy” languages like Vietnamese.

The Droid font family designed by Ascender for Google’s Android platform consists of the Droid Sans, Droid Sans Mono and Droid Serif fonts. Each font provides support for Western European, Eastern/Central European, Baltic, Cyrillic, Greek, and Turkish languages. While the Droid fonts are released under the Apache license, neither Google nor Ascender offers a downloadable version of the fonts. But, with a little perseverance, you can get the font working on your system. Download the system.tar.gz archive, unpack it, and you will find the Droid font in the fonts directory.

Finally, if you want to spice up your documents with a pinch of handwritten text, then take a look at the Rufscript font.

**As seen on Linutop Mag