Ubuntizing Red Hat Liberation Fonts

You've probably heard that Red Hat has released a set of Liberation Fonts, which are metric equivalents of the Microsoft Arial, Courier New, and Times New Roman fonts; thus you can use, e.g., Liberation Serif and your OpenOffice.org document should be exactly the same size as a Word document with the Times New Roman font. Note that they don't look exactly like the Microsoft fonts, for that would be copyright infringement, and rightly so.

The fonts aren't available in Ubuntu at the moment, but following a Ubuntu Forums thread, I extracted the relevant part of the installation script. (The rest of the script is supposed to improve font rendering on your screen — my fonts render well enough for my needs, so I'm leaving that alone. YMMV.)

To install the Liberation fonts, save this script as red_hat_lib_install:

#! /bin/bash

## See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=515947&highlight=red+hat+liberation+fonts

## Or http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3123244&postcount=3

## We'll only add Red Hat Liberation Fonts, forget the sub-pixel stuff
##  for now.

## Download the fonts from Red Hat
wget https://www.redhat.com/f/fonts/liberation-fonts-ttf-3.tar.gz

## Extract the package
tar -xvf liberation-fonts-ttf-3.tar.gz

## Copy the fonts to the proper directory
cp -r liberation-fonts-0.2 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/

## Delete temporary files
rm -r liberation-fonts-0.2/ liberation-fonts-ttf-3.tar.gz

## Rebuilt the font cache
fc-cache

and then

sudo ./red_hat_lib_install

Open up an applications such as OpenOffice, and admire the fonts (or not, again, YMMV, but you don't have to use them if you don't like them).

And while you're at it, look at all of these already Debianed fonts. There may be something there you really like — just don't send me your resume in flatline regular.