I admit this is something I do not know much about, not something I had thought of previously to going all open source, so my question might make sense, or it might not.

So, I’m currently writing a novel and, thus, making heavy use of text processors. Since I switched to Debian and to LibreOffice as well, I also decided to change my novel document format from Transitional OOXML to ODT moved by philosophy and belief in open standards. Yes, I was previously writing it on M. Word so that was the default doc format and my font was Calibri for most of the text. This was not a deliberate decision and was also not intended to be final, but something I would think about later on.

Well, now it is later on, and what’s sparked my curiosity has been all this change I’ve been doing. So, when I opened LibreOffice for the first time and saw ‘Liberation Self’ as the default font, it got thinking: are font letters open/free/libre, in the sense open source apps and formats are? Are they owned to some capacity by someone, or is it safe to assume that most fonts bundled with text editors have an open licence? If not, is there something I should be wary about this if I care about open standards?

Thank you in advance for any insight you can provide :)

  • Brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    4·
    5 hours ago

    I was reading into this recently too. My understanding is that Debian + LibreOffice install the Liberation Fonts by default so usually you don’t need to worry about documents using Ariel and Helvetica (Liberation are metrically compatible replacements).

    After further reading I ended up also installing the Crosextra fonts, the advantage of those two is that they are metrically compatible with Microsoft’s Calibri and Cambria. Once installed in theory LibreOffice should be able to open documents that had those Microsoft fonts and auto replace them with the open versions. (there’s a setting in LibreOffice to force font replacements but it didn’t seem like I needed to do that in my case)

    Some more info on that

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croscore_fonts#Crosextra_fonts

    The Crosextra font packages in Debian

    https://packages.debian.org/trixie/fonts-crosextra-carlito

    https://packages.debian.org/trixie/fonts-crosextra-caladea

    Also interestingly - if you do really, really want some of Microsoft’s fonts they are free to install but I don’t think you actually get a license to distribute/publish with them. I didn’t bother installing these but could be useful for someone with tons of old MS Office documents with lots of random MS fonts.

    https://packages.debian.org/trixie/ttf-mscorefonts-installer (need to enable contrib in your apt settings to be able to apt install those)