Well, it’s official: Bitstream and The GNOME Foundation have, at long last, released their much-hyped Vera font family.

My opinions? The standard Sans font looks somewhat like Verdana (which, admittedly, is a nice font to begin with), but it now has the added benefit of being released under an open license, allowing users to modify the font with new characters as they see fit, as long as they change the name. But even better, in my opinion, is Vera Sans Mono: finally, a decent, free monospaced font to use for program listings and terminal emulators, and one which has taken the place of Andale Mono as my default fixed-width font.

The fonts linked above should work perfectly fine on Unix and Windows systems, as long as you have a decompression program that can open tar files (which most popular compression software can). For the Mac people out there, I’ve gone ahead and converted them to Macintosh suitcase format, and you can download the Mac version from my site and use it right now. (Don’t you just love open licenses?)