Hi,

in order to produce portable documents I would like to use the free Microsoft fonts (unbelievable: "free" and "Microsoft" in one sentence...) in OpenOffice.org. On SuSE there's a command line tool called fetchmsttfonts (or so) that can be called from within YaST.

How can I make the freely downloadable Microsoft fonts available to OOo (and possibly X) on my Slackbox? And how do I download them (which URL, is there a script or tool that knows the paths, ...)?

Reason behind my problem: The fonts that come with the default install of OOo look different on Windows and Linux. (Don't ask me, why, this is something I just don't get, given that even some screen refresh bugs of OOo are ported to all supported platforms... but they didn't manage to deliver the same fonts).


Thanks!

gargamel

Microsoft terminated the free font download a long time ago.

You can get them from your XP CD or XP installation. The extension are tt_ and ttf.

Once you get them just cp them into your /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/TTF, and then run fc-cache. Restart X. They should now be avialable in X. fc-list to check.

The site that hosts the fonts - http://corefonts.sourceforge.net - gives instructions on how to build an RPM to install the fonts, etc. But that's complicated.

I did it by:

1) Go to the downloads section instead - http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/

Get *.exe and cabextract

2) Build cabextract

3) Use cabextract to open up the *.exe files (I also renamed the corresponding TTF files to all lowercase)

4) Copy the *.ttf files to /usr/X116/lib/fonts/TTF

(You could create a new directory instead, but then you have to add it to /etc/X11/xorg.conf)

5) As root, run fc-cache in /usr/X116/lib/fonts/TTF (I'm a little hazy on this step, but I think this is about right).

6) Enjoy your MS fonts!

Legal notes: Tahoma was bundled with IE, and bound by its license. To use Tahoma, you need IE. But IE requires Windows by its license, so the inference is to use Tahoma, you need a Windows license.

If you use that link and the scripts then the fonts will be available to Xft and from the older X font server. In my xorg.conf file, I only list the misc font directory because I only want the bare minimium fonts to be rendered by the x font server because it basically sucks and is outdated. Everything else I let Xft take care of. It's config is in /etc/fonts which there shouldn't be a need to mess with it if you dump your ttf fonts into the ttf directory. Also the fc-cache can be run from anywhere becuase the directories are listed in the /etc/fonts/ config file.

Man, you guys make this hard. R)

Just go to the dropline site and download the webfonts.tgz and cabextract.tgz (or somesuch) files and install the tgz files.

Or head over to KDE-look.org and under fonts they have the MS Core Fonts. Install using KControl's font installer (assuming you use KDE).

How is copy/pasting fonts into a folder and then updating the font cache hard?

Its probably quicker to copy and paste than downloading them, then having to install them using kfont installer.

The guide here worked perfectly for me when i was using both slack 10 and 10.1

That's quicker than downloading two packages and installpkg *tgz?

Hi Sporks,

Thanks for this quick tip. I've now got the MS fonts installed and it took about 30 seconds. Much quicker than SuSE which always seemed to take an age to install the M$ fonts.

Regards.

dkpw

I was referring to copying and pasting them from a windows installation cd as was suggested in one of the posts above. I copied all mine a while ago from a windows XP machine onto a cd and everytime I need to install them on Linux, I just copy and paste them.

Thank you all guys! You really helped me, finally I can exchange OOo docs between platforms.

Thanks!

gargamel