Putting TrueType (.ttf) fonts into Linpus on the Aspire One

While some people suggest that sticking with freeware fonts is better (for legal, moral, or personal reasons?) that is just bollocks.  OpenOffice comes with some reasonable fonts, but it is essential to be equipped with the universal standard fonts from Windows if you are going to work with other people on documents.

Here is how to install Windows TrueType fonts on Linpus.  It will make them usable in any application, for example Open Office 3…

• Open the File Manager and browser to /home/user/
• Create a new folder and call it .fonts
• It won’t display in the file list, as it’s a hidden folder.  So in the address bar you will have to type /home/user/.fonts/
• Copy over any TrueType fonts that you want to use  (e.g. Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Calibri, Cambria)
  • In Windows, these are probably located in C:\Windows\system32\Fonts\
• You should now find them available in OpenOffice and other apps that you want…

There is one little problem I have found.  The lovely new Cambria font doesn’t work, displaying in OpenOffice as the default font with random characters missing.  I guessed this was because it comes as a TrueType Collection (.ttc) file, containing Cambria and Cambria Math.

• To make it work, you need to extract the Cambria TTF font out of the TTC file – convert TTC to TTF.
• Download a program called fontforge that can convert fonts between TTF, TTC, OTC, Mac, Bitmap and other formats.  An RPM is available for Linux distributions such as Fedora, e.g. fontforge-20081224-1.i386.rpm.
  • The must be saved to disk, rather than openned with the package manager, as Linpus decides that fontforge needs fontforge to be present before it can be installed.  Clever dependancy problem there.
• Instead you need to open a terminal (ALT+F2, run “terminal”) in the directory you saved the rpm file to (probably /mnt/home/Downloads) and type:
  rpm -i fontforge-*.rpm

• More details on installation are available from http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/nix-install.html
  
• You then need to extract the Cambria TTF file from this TTC Collection.  The FontForge help pageswill give you the full information on how to do this, but here is the short version
  • You then need to open another terminal in the directory that the “CAMBRIA.TTC” file lives.  Then type the command:
    fontforge -c 'Open($1); Generate($2)' "CAMBRIA.TTC(Cambria) CAMBRIA.TTF

• Now delete the TTC file, and copy the TTF file into your .fonts directory.  Now Cambria will work (when it’s not bold or italic)

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