Monday 16 March 2020

Substitution for Microsoft's Calibri and Cambria fonts in LibreOffice

I know that there are many people out there who get very disappointed when they use LibreOffice for the first in order to open a document created with MS-Office and then see that the layout of the document getting ruined. One of the reasons why this is happening is the absence of the famous Calibri and Cambria fonts that as Wikipedia puts it ...

Calibri is also distributed with Microsoft Excel Viewer, Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer, the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Microsoft Windows and the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac. For use in other operating systems, such as cross-platform web use, Calibri is licensed by Ascender Corporation and its parent company Monotype Imaging.

Things could get more complicated especially if you use any MS font in a book and anything printed without licence but once again there is a workaround ...

In 2013, due to Calibri's widespread use in Microsoft Office documents, Google released a freely-licensed font called Carlito, which is metric-compatible to Calibri, as part of ChromeOS.[21] Because Carlito has the same font metrics as Calibri, ChromeOS users can correctly display and print a document designed in Calibri without disrupting layout. Carlito’s glyph shapes are based on the prior open-source typeface Lato, without de Groot's involvement.

To finish the story from the Cambria's side

Caladea
In 2013, as part of Chrome, Google released a freely-licensed font called Caladea, which is metric-compatible to Cambria (i.e. can replace it in a document without changing the layout).[10] It is based on Cambo, a font developed by the Argentine type foundry Huerta Tipográfica. Despite being metric-compatible, Caladea covers much smaller language range, e.g. it doesn't support Cyrillic, Greek and advanced typographic features like ligatures, old style numerals or fractions.

Carlito can be downloaded from here, while Caladea from here. After theses fonts are installed on your system, open any LibreOffice program, click on Menu Tools and then select Options. Open the "Font Replacement" page of the options dialogue and fill it like this.

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