Ubuntu Font Family
The Ubuntu Font Family are a set of matching new libre/open fonts initially developed during 2010-2011. The font was released under a libre-licence and is now packaged in Ubuntu 10.10 and later versions. Work is on-going to continue to improve the font.
http://launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family (project)
History
For information about the development of the font, and it's history within the project, see History.
Installation
Getting the font
Note, fonts installed via the PPA are not intended to be used on production systems as they represent unfinished and preview versions of the font. You are highly encourage to remove the ppa and associated fonts upon conclusion of your testing.
The font can be installed by adding the following ppa.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-font-beta-testing/0.83+arabic-beta-test sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Removing the font
You can use the ppa-purge tool to remove the font at the end of testing.
sudo apt-get install ppa-purge sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntu-font-beta-testing/0.83+arabic-beta-test
Testing
Testing on Ubuntu
You are encouraged to use your desktop as normal, and see visually how the font looks across your desktop and in different applications. In addition, you can the pango view tool to view and compare text.
Using pango view
You can use the pango-view tool to manually display text if different scenarios for visual comparison.
sudo apt-get install libpango1.0-dev
Displaying using the new font
pango-view --font="UbuntuPrerelease0910 48" --markup \ --text='<span fallback="false"> ENTER TEST TEXT HERE</span>'
Displaying using the default ubuntu font
pango-view --font="Ubuntu 48" --markup \ --text='<span fallback="false"> ENTER TEST TEXT HERE</span>'
In the above, the following characters have special meanings:
U+EFFD ('') = version number U+F000 '' = hinting (88 = autohinting, font size = manual hinting)
To clear your font cache
fc-cache -fv
Testing in a browser
Enter this in the URL field:
data:text/html;charset=UTF-8,<p style="font-family:Ubuntu;font-size:70;"> test text here</p>
Reporting a bug
When reporting a bug, please include a screenshot containing the above two characters (EFFD F000) as well as the problem you want to show. In most applications you can press ctrl+shift+U before typing the code of the character followed by a space, for example ctrl+shift+u EFFD space.