[ubuntu-za] Fonts

Robert robket at gmail.com
Sat Mar 21 17:01:28 GMT 2009


On 3/21/09, Hilton Gibson <hilton.gibson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bill Cairns wrote:
>> I don't understand how my fonts work and wonder if anyone can explain them
>> ...
>>
>> When I start a new document under OO Writer, my default font is Arial
>> - great - just what I want.
>>
>> But when I am sent a document in, say, Times New Roman from MS Word, I
>> cannot change the font to Arial - Arial does not appear under the
>> options in the pull-down font menu. In fact, if I paste a paragraph
>> from the Word document into the middle of a document that I have
>> written, I can't change the paragraph to Arial even though it is
>> surrounded by Arial text to the top and bottom.
>>
>> I don't have this problem when running OO on Windows.
>>
>> Bill
>>
> Hi
>
> I suggest, save it in an open format and then edit the open format.
>
> Cheers
>
> hg.
>
>

Hi Bill

I may be mistaken but I don't believe that Ubuntu comes shipped with
the the same "Arial" font as one might find on a windows installation,
due to legal issues.

The choice of fonts OpenOffice provides you with, depends on what you
have available installed on your system (hence why it is available in
Windows). However, there are fonts, such as FreeSans that are
equivalent to Arial. They look almost identical, and when OpenOffice
opens a file, and the text is Arial, it chooses the such a font as a
suitable replacement.

So when you select a font for text, although "Arial" is not an option
in the fonts list, you can double click on the selection box, and type
the word "Arial". The font will then be stored as Arial, it will be
displayed using a look alike (eg. FreeSans) and, I'm not sure about
this, but I believe that if you save it, it saves it as Arial (So if
you send it to someone with Windows it will use Arial).

What you can also do, if you want the real "Arial", is create a new
folder in your home folder, called ".fonts", and copy all the fonts
from a Windows installation into that folder. Those fonts will then be
available to all applications on your system. If you don't have access
to a Windows installation, you can install the package msttcorefonts,
which is basically a installer that downloads the fonts from the
internet. Note that personally I find msttcorefonts to be a pain, as
cancelling the downloading half way through is nearly impossible.

Good Luck

Robert



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