It should pick up the TTF/OTF fonts on your system, which you can download in HaikuDepot. Let me just check on a new install …
Right, a brand-new install of B4 has Noto and WenQuan Yi (which is only relevant to Chinese script AFAIK). Haiku itself comes with Bitstream Charter but that is in PS format, which LibreOffice seems to ignore.
If you have old favourites that are not listed there, just drop the .TTF files in /boot/home/config/non-packaged/data/fonts/ttfonts/ (create the directory if it doesn’t exist). No need to reboot but it will help if you restart any font-aware programs.
OK, thanks. I searched for “Verdana” and found “msttcorefonts”, which also got me Arial, Courier, Times New Roman, Georgia, Trebuchet. Enough to open a couple documents, anyway.
Why make it so needlessly difficult, there are ample amounts of freely available fonts that including “sane default” fonts package with install is a no brainier
I didn’t really look, myself, but I know some people are pretty fastidious about the terms under which things are distributed, and that might influence decisions about what to package with LibreOffice. And there’s the question of throwing in stuff that isn’t part of the LibreOffice distribution, and could in principle collide with existing font installs.
For me, something like msttcorefonts is fine, it just should be more immediately obvious to someone installing LibreOffice, like mentioned in the blurb. And it could be more complete.
If you search for “font” (which I did think of), you get all kinds of wacky stuff. You don’t know which ones will be available to LibreOffice, if any, and none of them that I noticed are fonts that your documents are going to have - Arial, etc. So that’s … not technically a dead end, but close enough. And if you find some of those fonts in msttcorefonts, you’re still missing some fairly common fonts. Palatino, for example. I rummaged around the internet and found Palatino, and Garamond, regular weight plain/italic. If you wanted a desktop for grandma, that’s probably not realistic, so somewhere along the line someone may want to put together a package of the fonts in widespread usage in documents. And mention it to people who install LibreOffice.
OK, let’s look at Palatino. It is not free. It actually belongs to Linotype GmbH, and via them to its corporate owner, Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc. If Microsoft bundles Palatino, they pay for the license.
Now a corporation is unlikely to come after you, personally, for pirating its font. They have bigger fish to fry. But when an official entity like Haiku does it, well … a single lawsuit could wipe out Haiku, Inc. This is why the Open-source community has created equivalents to those fonts. In Palatino’s case, it is URW Palladio L. If you have that loaded up, LibreOffice should substitute it for you automagically.
Not quite. There are onerous stipulations that call for workarounds (You can’t rename the files, they must be distributed as CAB files etc) but the original license under which Microsoft released the font still holds. Core fonts for the Web - Wikipedia
That’s interesting, but one way or another those proprietary fonts are obviously not ideal, and what I’m hearing is that there are replacements - but it isn’t clear, in what sense.
Let’s say I’m involved in a project where the documentation people decree we shall use Palatino. They hand me a document for revision I’m in Freedom world and have no Palatino, but I have URW Palladio L. LO Writer will automatically substitute that as mock Palatino, so it can render the existing text? New text I write, will automatically be sent back to them as Palatino, even though I wrote it in Palladio? If I author a document from scratch, they won’t be asking me what’s this Palladio BS, because it will let me specify Palatino that I don’t strictly speaking have?
The fonts are metrically compatible, that means that each character has the same size as in the original font. This is usefull to preserve layouting.
The characters won‘t neccesarily look the same. As for what font is saved I assume it is dependent on your software.
If you are involved with a project that wants to use a license encumbered font it seems reasonable that they would obtain a license for you too, to me at least : )
So it’s easy to use LO Writer for yourself to make up your own postcards or whatever, but if you want to collaborate with the rest of the world, for practical purposes you have to go pirate. Everyone has Arial, and if you don’t, that’s your problem.
It sounds to me like for Haiku, if you want a lawful solution for ordinary users, it’s the gimmick the wikipedia page mentioned (from Debian? I forget), where they get the files exactly as prescribed by EULA, and there’s a utility to extract them to a usable format.
Thanks very much for the quick fix @3dEyes . I noticed a minor glitch though, not sure if it’s my inegrated Intel Xe graphics or a general issue:
In fullscreen, there is a noticable (more tha 1px wide) white border on the right and bottom edge of the screen. Maybe some offset is wrong?
