Faq/General/034

Ok, NOT just for Linux but About.com have an alphabetically sorted list for other names of a font.

Arial Rounded has a free alternative called VAG Round.

The list of the A's is over 2 web pages. So they have a link for each letter.

http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/fonts/a/lookalikefonts.htm

This is one place to start looking for free alternatives for those pesky proprietary fonts.

Fonts are always a big decision. Many of us tend to go for the most popular and the most accessible to all. There is nothing worse than to get a machine substituted font that doesn't work. If you use an obscure font, then it is likely that whoever receives your files (unless they are .pdf), that their system will try to find the nearest compatible font possible.

Anyway, the caveat in all things font is to be careful not to add them all at once, even if you are feeling lucky. I had at one time experimented with fonts and thought I would chance luck, added a couple of hundred, and, somehow, one of them messed my Mandriva set-up for days. I had to go and delete them one by one to try to find the problem font ... once it was deleted then the other font files worked well. It was such a long process, which, I have not ever gone over again since.

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Another way to get MS Core fonts depends on your Linux distro. For Ubuntu, go to the Synaptic Package Manager and search for "ttf-mscorefonts-installer". If you have a different Linux distro, the installer file might have a different name.

Although the "defaults" for many system are the MS fonts, there is not real reason why you have to use their fonts. There are a number of free fonts that are look-alikes for MS fonts, but there are a whole range of great looking fonts out there that are free. There are a lot of free font sites out there. The above "About.com" info is one of the places to find other names for many popular fonts. Many of those names are freely downloadable ones. To be honest, if you have one font, you may find 10 to 20 more that are 98% +/- the same and could be used as a substitute for it. But there are some many good "specialty" fonts out there to choose from. So, please take the time to look at the free fonts sites and find some that looks good for your needs. One user of the LibreOffice office suite has over 100,000 fonts in his collection, most of them came from the free font sites. So, there are a lot of fonts out there to choose from. Some are good replacements to MS Core Fonts and Adobe Library of Fonts. Please search for what will work for your needs. Try the free versions of these fonts. And, have fun using the more decorative fonts.

Remember, you do not have to settle for any one set of fonts, but if you do use a non-popular one, make sure when you do send the document to others, send it in a form that embeds the font in the document itself. That way others can see your document the same way you see it. LibreOffice has an Export to PDF. If that does not include the "special" fonts with your document, for whatever reason, you can use "CUPS-PDF" in Linux and "doPDF" [free] in Windows. They both default with font embedding.