I found this script somewhere that will use fontforge to convert a font
to truetype. You may lose some features, but regular things like
kerning should be preserved. There are some truetype options that do
affect how well the font works, but I don't know off-hand what the
defaults would be when you run this script. You could run it inside
another script in order to automate converting all the fonts at once.
The only problem I've seen with this approach, is that if a font
contains ornaments that are bigger than standard letters (the Adobe Pro
fonts often do), then OpenOffice will set it's line height much too
high. Sometimes I've had to edit out certain glyphs to get fancy fonts
to play nicely with OpenOffice.
#!/usr/bin/fontforge
# Quick and dirty hack: converts a font to truetype (.ttf)
Print("Opening "+$1);
Open($1);
Print("Saving "+$1:r+".ttf");
Generate($1:r+".ttf");
Quit(0);
By the way, the people who care about typography would give you this
stock response when you mention 1000 fonts:
If you got a package with 1000 fonts, it was either
- Very expensive, or
- Contains fonts of dubious quality and/or legality.
Also, many fonts have EULA's that prohibit modification. Adobe is one
exception to that rule. Their EULA is friendly toward people who need
to modify fonts to use with things like Linux and TeX.
Sorry if the above is unneeded information, but sometimes I can't help
but mention the legalities of type, since respecting licenses is also
important in the Open Source world. :)
Scott
On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 06:38:07PM -0500, Huan Truong wrote:
> I have installed ~1000 OpenType fonts to my laptop. Gedit and stuff
> worked fine and I was able to see these fonts, but lately I found out
> that OpenOffice and Abiword do not support OpenType fonts (
> http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Font-FAQ#Are_OTF_fonts_supported_in_OpenOffice.org_2
> ). Which is crazy to me. I tried OOO 3 but OOO 3 Beta doesn't, either.
> I wonder if any of you have any ideas to use those fonts to use in my
> documents? I don't mind using alternatives.
>
> PS: After some minutes googling around, I had the confirmation from
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=645363&page=2 . But
> converting 1000 fonts with FontForge isn't really a choice for me.
> It's so painful to open each of them, and save as... it may drive me
> crazy.
>
> *************************************
> I am pretty sure AbiWord doesn't support .otf fonts. Neither does
> OpenOffice. Both are treating this not as a bug, but as a feature
> request which seems not to be getting top priority. This is a shame,
> since most of the major font producers have converted over all their
> libraries to OpenType.
>
> Linux itself should be able to handle the fonts through fontconfig,
> and they should be available in Gedit and some other applications.
> Check to see if these fonts are available in Gedit; if they are, then
> they are properly installed but they won't be available to you in
> AbiWord.
>
> A workaround is to convert the fonts to .ttf using FontForge. You will
> lose some of the special features of OpenType (ligatures, special
> kerning, etc.) but you should be able to use them in AbiWord and
> OpenOffice.org.
> *************************************
>
>
> --
> "Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".
> http://tnhh.info/
>
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