Monday, September 22, 2008

Calibri and OpenOffice.org

Microsoft's Calibri font (proprietary, introduced in Vista and/or Office 2007)  has bugged me because Open Office doesn't have a good default fall-back for it.  Result is that documents are frequently un-readable.  (Makes one wonder if this was intentional - like the old rumor about "Windows isn't done until Lotus doesn't run...")

I finally found and settled on a good solution, for me anyway, described here http://www.oooninja.com/2008/02/metrical-equivalent-fonts-and-font.html, in particular, this recipe for font replacement:
"At the OpenOffice.org level, you can specify font replacement rules. That means whenever OpenOffice.org encounters font X, it will use font Y instead.
  1. Open any OpenOffice.org application.
  2. Click Tools > Options.
  3. In the tree menu under OpenOffice.org, choose Fonts.
  4. Check the box Apply replacement table.
  5. Type the name of the Microsoft font in Font.
  6. In Replace with, type the name of the non-Microsoft font.
  7. Click the green checkmark.
  8. Repeat steps 5-7 as needed"
 I replaced Calibri with Comic Sans MS and it works fine for my purposes.  Thanks so much to OpenOffice.org Ninja - you rock!

UPDATE - if you're sharing docs on Microsoft platforms, one of the office versions may be missing a font.  See: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint-help/fonts-that-ship-with-different-versions-of-office-HA010282644.aspx for help from Microsoft.

Here is a recipe if you are on Ubuntu:  http://askubuntu.com/questions/34077/libreoffice-missing-certain-microsoft-fonts

2 comments:

zooplah said...

Why should a document that uses another font be unreadable? It seems that it should still be readable, only with a different font.

I've opened documents (.doc and .rtf) I've created in Office 2007 and they seem to work fine on Linux (sans Windows fonts) with both OpenOffice.org and AbiWord.

Silent Lilac said...

Yeah, here on XP whatever the fallback font is renders as something that looks like ant carcasses littering the screen.

Its surely an XP prob, not an Open Office prob.

I'd be on Ubuntu if I could get wireless working with the laptop.