Thursday, August 29, 2013

Open Sans Pro and Source Sans Pro on CentOS/Fedora/RHEL

I generally find that the Open Sans family of fonts and the Adobe Source Sans Pro pleasing. And since I am the designated main typist in my office, creating eye-pleasing documents is part of the JD.

Download the Adobe Source Sans Pro here  and Open Sans here

Extract them and copy the extracted directories to /usr/share/fonts

E.g.

#cp -R Open_Sans/ /usr/share/fonts

Then run the refresh

#fc-cache

Or if you prefer reboot the computer to make use of the fonts.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Calibri and Cambria compatible fonts and Font Embedding in LibreOffice

LibreOffice being my primary productivity suite has never failed to amaze me with its usability and many features and updates from one version to the next.  I started using OpenOffice.org in 2000 and then move on to the go-oo fork and now the latest incarnation - LibreOffice suite.

For those of us who often exchange documents with people who uses MSO, a Calibri compatible but free to use font type would be Asap. Cambria would be the Droid Serif font.

Both fonts look gorgeous and if you are unsure that folks on the receiving end have your fonts - LibreOffice 4.1 (download here) now supports font embedding (Files -> Properties -> Fonts tab)  so that your document would not look weird when you use Font A to compose your docs but the receiver hasn't Font A but uses something else closest to replace the font - which in reality isn't really good enough.

Kudos to the devs and volunteers who contributed to LibreOffice and the equally impressive (and I would say, prettier) Apache OpenOffice.