Good morning,
I have about 240 microsoft office word 2010 documents, all 9+ years old, that I'm converting to LibreOffice Writer in Fedora-35. I'm having to do this in 3 steps:
1. In windows-7, content is copied from the word files to Writer files. Tweaks are made to line spacing in tables. The word documents use two fonts: Times New Roman (various sizes; sometimes regular, sometimes italic, sometimes bold), and Vivaldi. Writer in windows-7 seems to support all the fonts used in the word documents.
2. Writer files are copied to my Fedora workstation.
Unfortunately, neither Times New Roman nor Vivaldi are available in Fedora-35. So I need a step 3: to convert the fonts to choices that are available in Fedora-35, and are expected to be available for a long time to come. It's that last condition that I need help with. It's happened to me in the past that a font that I used in Writer (in Fedora) ceased to be available, so I changed it to the closest match that was available. Then that font ceased to be available. So before I start step 3 with them 240ish Writer files, how do I know which fonts are likely to be permanent or supported in Fedora for many years, and which are most vulnerable to being sunset sooner rather than later?
By the way, why do so many fonts show up twice in the font selection tools?
Thank-you in advance.
Why not convert your files to PDF? You can embed all your fonts in each document and maintain your formatting, .i.e. the "look and feel"..
On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 8:21 AM home user mattisonw@comcast.net wrote:
Good morning,
I have about 240 microsoft office word 2010 documents, all 9+ years old, that I'm converting to LibreOffice Writer in Fedora-35. I'm having to do this in 3 steps:
- In windows-7, content is copied from the word files to Writer files.
Tweaks are made to line spacing in tables. The word documents use two fonts: Times New Roman (various sizes; sometimes regular, sometimes italic, sometimes bold), and Vivaldi. Writer in windows-7 seems to support all the fonts used in the word documents.
- Writer files are copied to my Fedora workstation.
Unfortunately, neither Times New Roman nor Vivaldi are available in Fedora-35. So I need a step 3: to convert the fonts to choices that are available in Fedora-35, and are expected to be available for a long time to come. It's that last condition that I need help with. It's happened to me in the past that a font that I used in Writer (in Fedora) ceased to be available, so I changed it to the closest match that was available. Then that font ceased to be available. So before I start step 3 with them 240ish Writer files, how do I know which fonts are likely to be permanent or supported in Fedora for many years, and which are most vulnerable to being sunset sooner rather than later?
By the way, why do so many fonts show up twice in the font selection tools?
Thank-you in advance. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
On 5/10/22 10:16 AM, Kam Leo wrote:
Why not convert your files to PDF? You can embed all your fonts in each document and maintain your formatting, .i.e. the "look and feel"..
1. I've previously created Writer docs in Fedora, and then later edited them and found that the font used when creating the docs is no longer supported, and then when editing them again later yet, the font used in the second version is no longer supported. What you suggest does not solve my problem in such cases. Also, I am likely to need to edit them 240ish converted documents in the future.
2. I will eventually be creating on my Fedora workstation more Writer documents like the 240ish I'm converting. For those, I do want the same "look and feel". PDF does not help.
The original question stands: How do I know which currently available Fedora fonts are most likely to be supported for a long time, and which are most vulnerable to sunsetting? This question is relevant to new documents as well as converting old ones.
On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 8:21 AM home user <mattisonw@comcast.net mailto:mattisonw@comcast.net> wrote:
Good morning, I have about 240 microsoft office word 2010 documents, all 9+ years old, that I'm converting to LibreOffice Writer in Fedora-35. I'm having to do this in 3 steps: 1. In windows-7, content is copied from the word files to Writer files. Tweaks are made to line spacing in tables. The word documents use two fonts: Times New Roman (various sizes; sometimes regular, sometimes italic, sometimes bold), and Vivaldi. Writer in windows-7 seems to support all the fonts used in the word documents. 2. Writer files are copied to my Fedora workstation. Unfortunately, neither Times New Roman nor Vivaldi are available in Fedora-35. So I need a step 3: to convert the fonts to choices that are available in Fedora-35, and are expected to be available for a long time to come. It's that last condition that I need help with. It's happened to me in the past that a font that I used in Writer (in Fedora) ceased to be available, so I changed it to the closest match that was available. Then that font ceased to be available. So before I start step 3 with them 240ish Writer files, how do I know which fonts are likely to be permanent or supported in Fedora for many years, and which are most vulnerable to being sunset sooner rather than later? By the way, why do so many fonts show up twice in the font selection tools? Thank-you in advance. _______________________________________________
On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 12:21 PM home user mattisonw@comcast.net wrote:
Good morning,
I have about 240 microsoft office word 2010 documents, all 9+ years old, that I'm converting to LibreOffice Writer in Fedora-35. I'm having to do this in 3 steps:
- In windows-7, content is copied from the word files to Writer files.
Tweaks are made to line spacing in tables. The word documents use two fonts: Times New Roman (various sizes; sometimes regular, sometimes italic, sometimes bold), and Vivaldi. Writer in windows-7 seems to support all the fonts used in the word documents.
I've been involved with conference proceedings where authors provided documents with "Times" like fonts from different versions of Windows and Office, including Japanese fonts (being used for English docuemnts). The organizers attempted to share the originals, but many authors encountered problems with differences in fonts such as missing "ffi" ligatures, differences in fonts used for mathematics, italics generated by simply transforming an upright font, and "fake" caps and small caps fonts. Open Office (this was before LO appeared) came to the rescue back then.
- Writer files are copied to my Fedora workstation.
Unfortunately, neither Times New Roman nor Vivaldi are available in Fedora-35. So I need a step 3: to convert the fonts to choices that are available in Fedora-35, and are expected to be available for a long time to come. It's that last condition that I need help with. It's happened to me in the past that a font that I used in Writer (in Fedora) ceased to be available, so I changed it to the closest match that was available. Then that font ceased to be available. So before I start step 3 with them 240ish Writer files, how do I know which fonts are likely to be permanent or supported in Fedora for many years, and which are most vulnerable to being sunset sooner rather than later?
You should look for high quality open source fonts. There is an abundance of low-quality open source fonts, many of which are not maintained and may not be available in the future.
The <Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) https://www.stixfonts.org/> project is supported by a consortium of publishers with the goal of making high-quality fonts that can be used across different software and can be expected to be available for many years.
By the way, why do so many fonts show up twice in the font selection tools?
Different programs may install different versions. You may have Type1,
Truetype, and or Opentype format files for the same font name, as well as multiple versions in the same format. Some systems provide aliased names so you can have two different fonts showing under the same generic name.
On 5/10/22 3:46 PM, George N. White III wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 12:21 PM home user <mattisonw@comcast.net mailto:mattisonw@comcast.net> wrote:
[... snip ...]
2. Writer files are copied to my Fedora workstation. Unfortunately, neither Times New Roman nor Vivaldi are available in Fedora-35. So I need a step 3: to convert the fonts to choices that are available in Fedora-35, and are expected to be available for a long time to come. It's that last condition that I need help with. It's happened to me in the past that a font that I used in Writer (in Fedora) ceased to be available, so I changed it to the closest match that was available. Then that font ceased to be available. So before I start step 3 with them 240ish Writer files, how do I know which fonts are likely to be permanent or supported in Fedora for many years, and which are most vulnerable to being sunset sooner rather than later?
You should look for high quality open source fonts. There is an abundance of low-quality open source fonts, many of which are not maintained and may not be available in the future.
The <Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) https://www.stixfonts.org/> project is supported by a consortium of publishers with the goal of making high-quality fonts that can be used across different software and can be expected to be available for many years.
STIX looks like a good idea for a Times New Roman replacement. It is on this workstation, though I don't know if it came with Fedora, LibreOffice, or something else. I don't see a good substitute for Vivaldi. STIX's script option has script for upper case only; I need script for both upper case and lower case. Z003 looks to be the only option already installed. By the way, the STIX website doesn't say or show much about their offerings.
With this workstation being 9+ years old, I'm preferring to use what comes with Fedora and/or LibreOffice. That will simplify migrating to a new workstation when someday that becomes necessary.
By the way, why do so many fonts show up twice in the font selection tools?
Different programs may install different versions. You may have Type1, Truetype, and or Opentype format files for the same font name, as well as multiple versions in the same format. Some systems provide aliased names so you can have two different fonts showing under the same generic name.
I'll come back to this after the main problem is fully solved.
-- George N. White III
Thank-you, George. Bill.
On Tue, 2022-05-10 at 09:21 -0600, home user wrote:
Unfortunately, neither Times New Roman nor Vivaldi are available in Fedora-35. So I need a step 3: to convert the fonts to choices that are available in Fedora-35, and are expected to be available for a long time to come. It's that last condition that I need help with.
I don't think anybody can tell which fonts will be long-lived. People release fonts (software, etc), make statements about them, then later change their mind or get bought out. I'd expect Liberation fonts to be around for a long time, Nimbus fonts have been around for ages. You could try some of the old-school (pre-computer) typefaces that have lots of clones.
LibreOffice, and other things, use the Liberation Serif, Liberation Sans, and Liberation Mono fonts, supposedly for freedom reasons, and they're supposed to be print-compatible replacements for some common windows fonts (i.e. your page layout shouldn't change for height and width reasons). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts
I've, more or less, settled on them over the last many years for reasons like you're concerned about.
It used to be a common feature for word processors to allow you to embed fonts with a document to deal with this kind of issue, though I haven't seen that feature for a long time. Not everybody had the same fonts, nor the same printer, and word processor files were really only of use on the same computer as the author (even Word users across different versions of Windows discovered they had compatibility issues). If you wanted to distribute a document, you needed to use a format intended for that purpose (self-contained, widely-compatible, etc).
There are are lookup tables that allow automatic substitution of unavailable fonts. You can configure your own choices in them, so when you load a file with missing fonts it substitutes your choice when it displays it. You don't have to modify the document.
There are also font conversion tools. You could preserve your original font, then convert it into the current format whenever you needed to, installing that new version.
If you change fonts you're bound to see some changes, after all the graphics will be copyrighted in many fonts. That may or may not be important to you. And if you've used any characters outside of the ASCII range, you'll find some fonts have less of the repertoire of characters your first one did. And then there's errors and bugs, you might unknowingly use something that's a goof in one format, but corrected in another, and vice versa.
Liberation Serif is supposed to be compatible with Times New Roman.
I can see a free Vivaldi font if I do a google search, I don't know if you can use the formats of the one I saw, and whether it looks the same as the one you were using. But it's an old design (well 1970s isn't old for me, but is for others), so people should have had time to clone it.
On 5/10/22 7:41 PM, Tim via users wrote:
On Tue, 2022-05-10 at 09:21 -0600, home user wrote:
[... snip ...]
There are are lookup tables that allow automatic substitution of unavailable fonts. You can configure your own choices in them, so when you load a file with missing fonts it substitutes your choice when it displays it. You don't have to modify the document.
I looked at that table in LibreOffice Writer before opening this thread. It was empty. No clue as to what is being substituted for Times New Roman or Vivaldi.
There are also font conversion tools. You could preserve your original font, then convert it into the current format whenever you needed to, installing that new version.
I've neither seen nor heard of any. Do any come with Fedora?
[... snip ...]
Liberation Serif is supposed to be compatible with Times New Roman.
I give that a try, along with STIX as suggested by George.
I can see a free Vivaldi font if I do a google search, I don't know if you can use the formats of the one I saw, and whether it looks the same as the one you were using. But it's an old design (well 1970s isn't old for me, but is for others), so people should have had time to clone it.
I'll try Z003 first. As I mentioned in my reply to George, it seems wise in my circumstances to stick with what comes with Fedora and/or LibreOffice.
Thank-you, Tim. Bill.
Tim:
There are are lookup tables that allow automatic substitution of unavailable fonts. You can configure your own choices in them, so when you load a file with missing fonts it substitutes your choice when it displays it. You don't have to modify the document.
Bill:
I looked at that table in LibreOffice Writer before opening this thread. It was empty. No clue as to what is being substituted for Times New Roman or Vivaldi.
You can decide what fonts it uses, instead.
Also, there are substitution tables outside of LibreOffice. Look up how to configure Linux font substitution, aliases, and default fonts.
NB: It's been years since I toyed with this, so I don't have ready- made answers about this.
There are also font conversion tools. You could preserve your original font, then convert it into the current format
I've neither seen nor heard of any. Do any come with Fedora?
I believe so. sudo yum search all font
If you want to waste a few hours font browsing, try looking through here: https://fonts.google.com/ There's masses to choose from. Sometimes you can find exact equivalents.
On 5/10/22 08:21, home user wrote:
I have about 240 microsoft office word 2010 documents, all 9+ years old, that I'm converting to LibreOffice Writer in Fedora-35. I'm having to do this in 3 steps:
- In windows-7, content is copied from the word files to Writer files.
Tweaks are made to line spacing in tables. The word documents use two fonts: Times New Roman (various sizes; sometimes regular, sometimes italic, sometimes bold), and Vivaldi. Writer in windows-7 seems to support all the fonts used in the word documents.
The fonts are provided by the operating system. Any application can access the fonts.
- Writer files are copied to my Fedora workstation.
Why don't you just copy the font files from Windows to your Fedora system? Then you won't have to change it. Also, why are you copying the content? You could copy the Doc files to Fedora and open them directly in Writer. Save them in ODT format only when you need to edit them.
On 5/11/22 3:58 PM, Joe Zeff wrote:
On 5/11/22 15:06, Samuel Sieb wrote:
You could copy the Doc files to Fedora and open them directly in Writer. Save them in ODT format only when you need to edit them.
Or, just leave them as .doc files if/when you edit them. LO has no problem with that.
My reply to Samuel applies here.
Thank-you, Joe. Bill.
On 5/11/22 3:06 PM, Samuel Sieb wrote:
On 5/10/22 08:21, home user wrote:
[... snip ...]
- Writer files are copied to my Fedora workstation.
Why don't you just copy the font files from Windows to your Fedora system? Then you won't have to change it. Also, why are you copying the content? You could copy the Doc files to Fedora and open them directly in Writer. Save them in ODT format only when you need to edit them.
I did some serious experimenting this past winter. Writer could not adequately handle the word-2010 documents. I even tried first converting the word-2010 documents to word-2016. Writer could not adequately handle those. Either way, I lose roughly half the text, plus some of the formatting other than fonts. It seems the problem is the "frames" in the word documents. There is a LibreOffice bug on this. So I find my wisest option is to convert the files to LibreOffice now, even if it's somewhat manual. And the conversion must be done on the windows box.
Thank-you, Samuel.
Bill.
On Wed, 2022-05-11 at 21:37 -0600, home user wrote:
I did some serious experimenting this past winter. Writer could not adequately handle the word-2010 documents. I even tried first converting the word-2010 documents to word-2016. Writer could not adequately handle those. Either way, I lose roughly half the text, plus some of the formatting other than fonts. It seems the problem is the "frames" in the word documents. There is a LibreOffice bug on this. So I find my wisest option is to convert the files to LibreOffice now, even if it's somewhat manual. And the conversion must be done on the windows box.
That makes sense, convert them before you're in a hurry to need them.
You can run some office software in Linux (emulators or virtual environments), that could help with copying and pasting. Unless you'd prefer to run LibreOffice (for example) on Windows, and not have to bother with trying to get Windows software to run.
There can be some benefit in remaking documents from scratch (removing peculiar fonts bigger, fonts smaller, fonts bigger, fonts smaller instructions that crept in between paragraphs, for example). When I've had to convert things before, I've often pasted slabs of text into a plain text editor, in the middle, then copy and pasted from there to the next application, to completely remove all formatting. Often the remove formatting options in word processors only does a partial job. A particular bugbear was trying to get them to not stylise a web address as a clickable link. Once it had done that, there was almost no undoing of it within the program.
It sounds like you were using Word more as desktop publishing rather than typing. The fancier stuff isn't really the forté of word processors, other applications may be more suitable.
On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 10:31 PM Tim via users < users@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
On Wed, 2022-05-11 at 21:37 -0600, home user wrote:
I did some serious experimenting this past winter. Writer could not adequately handle the word-2010 documents. I even tried first converting the word-2010 documents to word-2016. Writer could not adequately handle those. Either way, I lose roughly half the text, plus some of the formatting other than fonts. It seems the problem is the "frames" in the word documents. There is a LibreOffice bug on this. So I find my wisest option is to convert the files to LibreOffice now, even if it's somewhat manual. And the conversion must be done on the windows box.
That makes sense, convert them before you're in a hurry to need them. [...]
It sounds like you were using Word more as desktop publishing rather than typing. The fancier stuff isn't really the forté of word processors, other applications may be more suitable.
LaTeX and ConTeXt source files are plain text, and with markup is intended to convey structure. The choices for fonts and "decorations" are provided in "styles". Publishers often provide their own styles to authors. [There are, however, way too many internet sites advertising low-level hacks that defeat the structural markup.] These document formats allow font changes to be done through styles, so the same source document can be used with minimal changes with free fonts on author systems and then formatted for publication using the fonts provided by the publisher's production systems.
If you want documents to be useful in the distant future, LaTeX or is more likely to be useful than vendor-specific formats. ConTeXt is maintained by a commercial company so is less concerned with preserving older documents than with supporting new products (think of techincal manuals moving from print to DVD to tablet formats), while the LaTeX maintainers spend a great deal of effort ensuring that legacy documents process correctly.
On Fri, 2022-05-13 at 07:48 -0300, George N. White III wrote:
LaTeX and ConTeXt source files are plain text, and with markup is intended to convey structure. The choices for fonts and "decorations" are provided in "styles". Publishers often provide their own styles to authors.
That's how I've made webpages for longer than I can remember (the styling is a separate, and common, file for all the webpages). And how I've done word processing (type the stuff, mark up the content types, and then adjust how it looks through the styling). Although the word proc doesn't seem to have any way to create a style and export it, it does offer an import feature (that I've never used).
[There are, however, way too many internet sites advertising low- level hacks that defeat the structural markup.]
And therein lay part of a problem:
Firstly, as you bring up, the abuse of context to generate an appearance: Webpages suffered many years of people shoving everything in tables, even though it wasn't tabular data. Then, later on, everything is in a DIV.
Secondly, people producing things in templates, everything, in someone else's template. So many things look the same, with generic stock photos shoved in where they serve no purpose, and fake the staff that you don't employ. And so-easily hacked websites because they use a blogging database (with those templates) that is chock full of security holes.
If you want documents to be useful in the distant future, LaTeX or is more likely to be useful than vendor-specific formats.
I'd briefly looked at LaTex, decided it was more pain that is worth for *me* to learn, but lots of people provide that same advice. Having been down the road, before, of using proprietary word proc doc formats that couldn't be used elsewhere, I see the value of well defined and universal document formats. And it is a format that print publishers could handle, if your documents were heading that way.
If your documents are read-only (no more editing required), whether that be on-screen or on-paper, then PDF is one of the widely supported formats, and I imagine will be for a very long time. It's viewable on nearly every system. Even the utilities send your bills in that format, now.
There are some PDFs that can be re-edited, but usually they embed another format inside them that your editor will use to regenerate a new PDF around it. If you try copying and pasting PDF content to other formats you soon discover they're usually generated from a mish-mash of disorded things cobbled together. Few are in a coherent sequence.
On Sat, 2022-05-14 at 11:21 +0930, Tim via users wrote:
I'd briefly looked at LaTex, decided it was more pain that is worth for *me* to learn, but lots of people provide that same advice. Having been down the road, before, of using proprietary word proc doc formats that couldn't be used elsewhere, I see the value of well defined and universal document formats. And it is a format that print publishers could handle, if your documents were heading that way.
You might be interested in Overleaf:
poc
On Sat, 14 May 2022 11:21:32 +0930 Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Fri, 2022-05-13 at 07:48 -0300, George N. White III wrote: I'd briefly looked at LaTex, decided it was more pain that is worth for *me* to learn, but lots of people provide that same advice. Having been down the road, before, of using proprietary word proc doc formats that couldn't be used elsewhere, I see the value of well defined and universal document formats. And it is a format that print publishers could handle, if your documents were heading that way.
Try markdown if LaTeX is too complicated. Markdown is a simple, text-based markup language that can be automatically converted to other formats, including HTML, LaTeX, PDF, and MS Word. It is amenable to version control since it is text-base; it is the preferred documentation format for GitHub and GitLab. Markdown syntax is simple enough for a person to read and write after quick introduction.
I have been using LaTeX for decades and have designed several document classes. Markdown is better for most of my documents, unless I need a publication quality PDF with advance formatting.
I don’t grok word processors. Plain text is just as good for simple documents and WYSIWYG interferes with complicated formatting. Many of the Word files I get from my colleagues are a mess.
Jim
P.S. This e-mail is an example of markdown.
On Sat, 2022-05-14 at 07:42 -0600, James Szinger wrote:
I don’t grok word processors. Plain text is just as good for simple documents and WYSIWYG interferes with complicated formatting. Many of the Word files I get from my colleagues are a mess.
To paraphrase Brian Kernighan:
WYSIWYG means "What You See Is ALL You Get".
poc
On Sat, 2022-05-14 at 07:42 -0600, James Szinger wrote:
Try markdown if LaTeX is too complicated. Markdown is a simple, text-based markup language that can be automatically converted to other formats, including HTML, LaTeX, PDF, and MS Word.
I may have another look at these. I don't particularly have a need, so that does leave time for experimentation.
But I've found that converting document formats has always produced garbage. One does something the other does not, so it fakes it by shoehorning content into things where it doesn't belong (the wrong elements), or masses of metadata getting shovelled in.
e.g. what was simply <ol> <li>something</li> <li>something</li> </ol>
Gets infiltrated with junk like this:
<ol class="junk342"> <li class="junk343">something</li> <li class="junk343">something</li> </ol>
The classes weren't necessary, the characters in the classes mean nothing. I would have done no specific styling of elements. I'd have styled any ol inside the header one way, any ol inside the main another way, any ol inside the nav another way, etc. i.e. A simple set of selective CSS rules, not explicit styling except for a few cases, where the class names would actually make sense to me (e.g. "sitebanner"). That tag soup eliminates the prime feature of HTML with CSS that I can simply restyle the website by adjusting the stylesheet (in this case, I can't *simply* adjust the stylesheet, I have to extensively study all the HTML).
I even see that class crap shovelled in when I haven't done any styling, I'd just been typing completely plain HTML. Email clients' HTML generators have to be the absolute worst, even worse than wordprocessors for creating that junk.
I don’t grok word processors. Plain text is just as good for simple documents and WYSIWYG interferes with complicated formatting. Many of the Word files I get from my colleagues are a mess.
I can handle word processors fine, but I don't like fixing other people's documentation. There's a font over here, and another over there, there's no reason for either of them. Correcting one spelling error repaginates several pages, argh! None of them can use punctuation correctly, and they all use them like an electric typewriter, trying to jam things into place with carriage returns and blank lines.
On 5/12/22 7:30 PM, Tim via users wrote:
On Wed, 2022-05-11 at 21:37 -0600, home user wrote:
I did some serious experimenting this past winter. Writer could not adequately handle the word-2010 documents. I even tried first converting the word-2010 documents to word-2016. Writer could not adequately handle those. Either way, I lose roughly half the text, plus some of the formatting other than fonts. It seems the problem is the "frames" in the word documents. There is a LibreOffice bug on this. So I find my wisest option is to convert the files to LibreOffice now, even if it's somewhat manual. And the conversion must be done on the windows box.
That makes sense, convert them before you're in a hurry to need them.
You can run some office software in Linux (emulators or virtual environments), that could help with copying and pasting. Unless you'd prefer to run LibreOffice (for example) on Windows, and not have to bother with trying to get Windows software to run.
There can be some benefit in remaking documents from scratch (removing peculiar fonts bigger, fonts smaller, fonts bigger, fonts smaller instructions that crept in between paragraphs, for example). When I've had to convert things before, I've often pasted slabs of text into a plain text editor, in the middle, then copy and pasted from there to the next application, to completely remove all formatting. Often the remove formatting options in word processors only does a partial job. A particular bugbear was trying to get them to not stylise a web address as a clickable link. Once it had done that, there was almost no undoing of it within the program.
It sounds like you were using Word more as desktop publishing rather than typing. The fancier stuff isn't really the forté of word processors, other applications may be more suitable.
With both office word and LibreOffice Writer on the windows-7 box, this has not been difficult. I have a Writer template. For each document, I do 4 selects from the word document, and pastes into the Writer template. Then in the Writer template, there's 8 line-spacing adjustments. Finally "Save As...".
Thank-you, Tim. Bill.
On 5/10/22 9:21 AM, home user wrote:
I'd like to suspend this thread for a few days while I go to the LibreOffice community with a few LibreOffice-specific questions.
thanks, Bill.
Good morning,
I have about 240 microsoft office word 2010 documents, all 9+ years old, that I'm converting to LibreOffice Writer in Fedora-35. I'm having to do this in 3 steps:
- In windows-7, content is copied from the word files to Writer files.
Tweaks are made to line spacing in tables. The word documents use two fonts: Times New Roman (various sizes; sometimes regular, sometimes italic, sometimes bold), and Vivaldi. Writer in windows-7 seems to support all the fonts used in the word documents.
- Writer files are copied to my Fedora workstation.
Unfortunately, neither Times New Roman nor Vivaldi are available in Fedora-35. So I need a step 3: to convert the fonts to choices that are available in Fedora-35, and are expected to be available for a long time to come. It's that last condition that I need help with. It's happened to me in the past that a font that I used in Writer (in Fedora) ceased to be available, so I changed it to the closest match that was available. Then that font ceased to be available. So before I start step 3 with them 240ish Writer files, how do I know which fonts are likely to be permanent or supported in Fedora for many years, and which are most vulnerable to being sunset sooner rather than later?
By the way, why do so many fonts show up twice in the font selection tools?
Thank-you in advance.
On Fri, 2022-05-13 at 10:23 -0600, home user wrote:
By the way, why do so many fonts show up twice in the font selection tools?
I can't say I've noticed that, but I haven't installed lots of fonts recently. It's many years since I went on a font binge. I can think of a few things:
The top of the list shows recently used fonts, so you can quickly find them without trawling the entire list.
You may have installed the same font more than once (e.g. a system installation, and a local-user installation), and maybe it hasn't handled that well.
You could have different versions of the same font (e.g. there's a TTF and a postscript version of a font with the same name).
On 5/13/22 10:23 AM, home user wrote:
On 5/10/22 9:21 AM, home user wrote:
I'd like to suspend this thread for a few days while I go to the LibreOffice community with a few LibreOffice-specific questions.
thanks, Bill.
Back to this.
According to the LibreOffice community, LibreOffice installs *no* fonts on Fedora systems, and no longer supports "Type 1" fonts. So what I need to know now are 1. What fonts are by default automatically installed by Fedora (whether by a new install or by "dnf system-upgrade"? Equivalently, which of the fonts on my work station were put there by Fedora itself, and which were installed by other packages? (My initial install was in early spring of 2013.) 2. Which of the fonts on my work station are "Type 1" and which are not?
On Tue, 2022-05-24 at 21:01 -0600, home user wrote:
- What fonts are by default automatically installed by Fedora
(whether by a new install or by "dnf system-upgrade"? Equivalently, which of the fonts on my work station were put there by Fedora itself, and which were installed by other packages? (My initial install was in early spring of 2013.)
Have you tried running a live disc (as a live disc, rather than installing it), and see what comes on that basic install?
- Which of the fonts on my work station are "Type 1" and which are
not?
"file" command.
[tim@fluffy ~]$ file /usr/share/fonts/urw-base35/NimbusSansNarrow-BoldOblique.t1 /usr/share/fonts/urw-base35/NimbusSansNarrow-BoldOblique.t1: PostScript Type 1 font text (NimbusSansNarrow-BoldOblique 1.00)
The filename suffix was a bit of a clue, but I used file to check.
On Tue, May 24, 2022 at 11:03 PM home user mattisonw@comcast.net wrote: [...]
- What fonts are by default automatically installed by Fedora (whether
by a new install or by "dnf system-upgrade"? Equivalently, which of the fonts on my work station were put there by Fedora itself, and which were installed by other packages? (My initial install was in early spring of 2013.)
You could run "sudo dnf provides *pathame*" on each of the font files to find the package(s) that provide it, and then "sudo dnf list installed *package-name*" on each package to show the repo that provided the package. There may be a better/easier way, but this is what comes immediately to mind.
On 5/24/22 9:01 PM, home user wrote:
Back to this.
According to the LibreOffice community, LibreOffice installs *no* fonts on Fedora systems, and no longer supports "Type 1" fonts. So what I need to know now are
- What fonts are by default automatically installed by Fedora (whether
by a new install or by "dnf system-upgrade"? Equivalently, which of the fonts on my work station were put there by Fedora itself, and which were installed by other packages? (My initial install was in early spring of 2013.) 2. Which of the fonts on my work station are "Type 1" and which are not?
I was hoping that somewhere in its website, Fedora has a list of what comes with it by default. I haven't found one, and no one mentioned one. Another possible solution would be a new, more powerful font tool. See my post to the "font tools (was "font longevity questions.")" thread for my thoughts on that.
I'm marking this thread "CLOSED". I thank those who tried to help for their time and efforts. The discussion did help.
On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 8:21 AM home user mattisonw@comcast.net wrote:
Good morning,
I have about 240 microsoft office word 2010 documents, all 9+ years old, that I'm converting to LibreOffice Writer in Fedora-35. I'm having to do this in 3 steps
Add a 4th step to your checklist. Backup and transfer the fonts you legally own to durable media and install them as needed. It may be as simple as navigating to C:\Windows\Fonts, and then copying the font files to a USB disk and then installing them locally on another machine. Adobe fonts are often constrained so look for and use ones that are not. TeX fonts are another source of confusion and opportunity. Apple fonts seem to be favorites of managers.
Font formats add additional confusion, both display and print, watch for pix map fonts that do not scale for your display.
On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 2:35 PM Tom Mitchell niftyfedora@niftyegg.com wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 8:21 AM home user mattisonw@comcast.net wrote:
Good morning,
I have about 240 microsoft office word 2010 documents, all 9+ years old, that I'm converting to LibreOffice Writer in Fedora-35. I'm having to do this in 3 steps
Add a 4th step to your checklist. Backup and transfer the fonts you legally own to durable media and install them as needed.
You rarely "own" fonts. Licenses for commercial fonts may allow backups, but only for recovery on the system where they were first installed.
Quoting https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/font-faq: "Apart from the document embedding rights described previously, you may not redistribute the Windows fonts. You may not copy them to other computers or servers, and you may not convert them to other formats, including bitmap formats, or modify them."
It may be as simple as navigating to C:\Windows\Fonts, and then copying the font files
to a USB disk and then installing them locally on another machine.
Adobe fonts are often constrained so look for and use ones that are not. TeX fonts are another source of confusion and opportunity. Apple fonts seem to be favorites of managers.
Font formats add additional confusion, both display and print, watch for pix map fonts that do not scale for your display.
Font technology has been evolving to support more languages, etc. You should not expect arbitrary fonts installed in previous Windows versions to be supported in current versions. I hope that future MS Word will import legacy documents using some hidden conversion process, but in the past manual cleanup has been required.
On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 12:07 PM George N. White III gnwiii@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 2:35 PM Tom Mitchell niftyfedora@niftyegg.com wrote:
On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 8:21 AM home user mattisonw@comcast.net wrote:
Good morning,
I have about 240 microsoft office word 2010 documents, all 9+ years old,
......
Backup and transfer the fonts you legally own to durable media and install them as needed.
You rarely "own" fonts. Licenses for commercial fonts may allow backups, but only for recovery on the system where they were first installed.
Thank you for reinforcing this point. Fonts and friends are a fickle tangle. Keep things simple. An old boss could not cope with a text file that did not end in .txt My job was to support the products on an exhaustive list of unix and linux systems (sigh).
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