Q4OS Forum

BSpinoza

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2016-03-26

Posts: 30

How to install Microsoft's fonts.

Q4OS and other Linux distributions include "Liberation Fonts", which were designed to substitute Microsoft’s popular fonts. However, these fonts don’t look identical to Microsoft’s fonts. To get a maximum of compatibility to Microsoft documents with your office suite used in Q4OS, it is necessary to install Microsoft's fonts (e. g. Times New Roman, Calibri).

The following two font packages give you the standard Microsoft Office fonts, from the older TrueType core fonts like Times New Roman to the newer ClearType Fonts like calibri, the standard fonts used in Microsoft Office documents by default.

Installation of the TrueType Core Fonts
Microsoft released a package of "TrueType core fonts for the web" in 1996. These fonts were given a very permissive license agreement, so anyone could install them. Microsoft terminated this project in 2002, but the fonts can still be installed thanks to Microsoft’s old license agreement.

Open you terminal and use the following:

sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

(You can also install the Synaptic package "ttf-mscorefonts-installer".)

Installation of the ClearType fonts
Microsoft added a group of new "ClearType Fonts" to Windows with Windows Vista and Office 2007.  Microsoft does make these fonts available to download as part of their free PowerPoint Viewer 2007 application. The following method downloads the free PowerPoint Viewer 2007 application from Microsoft, extracts the six ClearType fonts, and installs them on your Q4OS system.

sudo apt-get install cabextract
mkdir .fonts 
wget -qO- http://plasmasturm.org/code/vistafonts-installer/vistafonts-installer | bash

I've extracted this instructions from this article of PCWorld by Chris Hoffman:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2863497/ … uites.html

In Q4OS it works fine with my Dell INSPIRON mini 1012, my Dell VOSTRO 1520 and LibreOffice.
I hope you can use it too.

All the best
BSpinoza

Last edited by BSpinoza (2016-10-15 06:49)

bin

Member

From: U.K.

Registered: 2016-01-28

Posts: 1,350

Re: How to install Microsoft's fonts.

Thanks for the info. It is worth noting that Calibri (and possibly other Cleartype) uses bitmaps for rendering smaller font sizes, or larger font sizes at lower zoom size. This can be puzzling till you know what is happening. It is possible to fiddle with .fonts.conf but..........

If you want to stay native then Carlito is the equivalent to Calibri.

I have noticed slight kerning issues with some of the linux native equivalents, but this may just be down to the application rather than he font as there are some very complex algorithms involved. I see it mostly in Scribus.