[Lazarus] Liberation Sans font availability under Linux (alternative to Arial)

[Henry Vermaak]

On 25/01/11 08:31, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I normally use Arial under both Windows and Linux in my GUI apps. But
> Arial is not standard on most Linux distros - I believe it comes with
> the additional MS Web Fonts package.
>
> Anyway, recently I saw on WikiPedia that the font Liberation Sans was
> explicitly designed to have the exact same metrics as Arial. It seem the
> Liberation Sans font came standard with my Ubuntu 10.04 install.
>
> Do other Linux distros have Liberation Sans font as standard? Thus
> making it a good alternative to use, compared to Arial (under Linux).

There is no "standard" Debian, since you can choose whether you'd like 
an X server on startup.  This may help you, though (from squeeze):

$ apt-cache rdepends --no-recommends --no-suggests ttf-liberation
ttf-liberation
Reverse Depends:
   xbmc-skin-pm3-hd
   sisu-pdf
   moovida-plugins-bad
   mokomaze
  |libphp-jpgraph
   freedink-engine
   calibre

Openoffice does recommend it (which means it will get installed 
automatically by aptitude), but I don't think that openoffice gets 
installed in a default Gnome install (except if I've followed the 
dependencies incorrectly).  From the above you can see that it's not 
needed, either way for any "standard" meta packages.

Henry