[lug] libreoffice fonts: Helvetica

[rm at tuxteam.de]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 12:09:56PM +0000, stimits at comcast.net wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> FYI, I'm using Fedora 16.
> 
> I've been looking around as to where to find fonts which do not seem to be available
> anymore, but which are (and have been) free for a long time...especially Helvetica
> (historically, this was the free equivalent answer to MSs Aria

I fear you got history wrong in this case. Helvetica is _not_ a free
version of Arial (hardly possible, beeing designed in the 50th ...). It
original typeface isn't "free" for any definition of "free" either.
Helvetica _is_ included in the so-called 'Core Font Set', so there's a
pretty good chance that you postscript printer includes this font (or a
derivative of the original).
IIRC some versions of StarOffice included fully licened sets of
commercial fonts - I recently bought a cheap used copy of a StarOffice
book just for the included version 5.2 with it's Lucida Bright fonts
....

> Documentation from
> the Open Office substitute "libreoffice" has been rather pointless. I did install a few
> fonts, via yum install of rpms found in yum search, and even those do not seem to
> show up in libreoffice. I'm wondering why it is so hard to find Helvetica? Anyone
> here have Helvetica available, and if so, where did you find it? Was it just an rpm,
> or was extra configuration required to make libre office see this? I re
> software being on Linux. I suppose I could reboot back and forth...

Iff you have it in Windows, why don't you use these fonts then? (Nota
bene: you probably violate licences doing so) 
Does it really need to be _the_ Helvetica? There are lots of substitute
fonts with similar design (Arial or "MS Sans Serif" would be available
for Linux and come pretty close). Or have a look at "Nimbus Sans L
Regular" which _is_  used by many open source projects as a Helvetica
alternative (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbus_Sans_L).

HTH Ralf Mattes












 

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> D. Stimits, stimits AT comcast DOT net
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