Openoffice: Helvetica font missing

Normally, I assume, that the standard fonts like Helvetica and Times are installed on every linux system. When using OpenOffice Writer I realized, that it is not possible to choose Helvetica or Times. Typing "Helvetiva" directly into the font box works and the letters are looking correctly afterwards, but I want to have the fonts "Helvetica" and "Times" available in the drop-down box.

Is there a way to make the standard fonts Helvetica and Times selectable in OpenOffice Writer?

 

Have you tried Liberation Sans? It's close. The other option is to copy the Helvetica ttf files from your Windows install to a directory under /usr/share/fonts

 

You can follow the procedure here to install the common Microsoft fonts.

 

My understanding is that OpenOffice hides fonts that it does not think are suitable for printing, even though they exist on the system in some format or other. So OO is trying to help you, by concealing fonts that it has no reason to think will be able to print properly. The AA1 has the standard Adobe Helvetica, Times, etc., installed (in Adope Type-1 format), but OpenOffice does not seem to offer them, presumably because it does not think that they are printer-ready (don't know why -- since there are .pfm files for all of them).

On desktop Linux systems, a popular work-around for this problem is to install a dummy PostScript printer, because PS printers invariably have these fonts and OO knows that. I haven't tried it on the AA1, however, because it only supports network and USB printers, so it's a pain to install a dummy one.

As RokcDoctor says, installing a TrueType Helvetica may get around the problem, because TrueType does not distinguish between print-quality and screen-quality fonts in the way that the standard unix Type-1 fonts do.

 

The URW fonts are a set of cloned fonts donated by URW to replace the 35 commonly found postscript fonts (base35). The Helvatica clone is "Nimbus Sans", the Times clone is "Nimbus Roman No, 9".

 

Many thanks for your advice. Meanwhile, I have checked the installation of my AAO and examined all "fonts.dir" files in the several font directories. It seems as if Helvetica fonts are only available as 100dpi-fonts for X11.

Since I don't like the idea of using the Windows-TTF-clones of Helvetica, which often are of a bad quality, I would prefer using real Type1-Helvetica fonts. Is there a package available for Linpus Linux? Otherwise I would have to copy the fonts from another Linux machine at home.

 

That font is a bitmap font. Please don't use it for printing.

Why don't you just use Nimbus Sans? The URW fonts (type1) are installed on all Linux systems (including Linpus) by default for Ghostscript. They are high quality fonts donated by a proper foundry:

http://www.urwpp.de/english/home.html

I also notice that the Ghostscript in Linpus is missing the default font.map file which maps the common classic postscript fonts to URW fonts (for situations where fonts are not embedded in the ps or pdf file), People will have trouble viewing/printing files with no fonts embedded or embedding fonts into their ps/pdf files with Ghostscript. Now that I know this is a problem, it is off to fix Ghostscript.

Here is some info on Ghostscript and fonts:

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/cvs/Fonts.htm

 

I forgot to add, like I said, clones of the standard fonts (base35) that comes with postscript printers are installed. They are however called by different names. The reason for this is because the font names (Avant Garde, Bookman, Courier, Helvetica, New Century School Book, Palatino, Time, Zapf Chancery, Zapf Dingbats, etc) are all trademarked by their respective foundries (Linotype, Monotype, etc). There is no legal way to name the fonts using those names.

 

Again, many thanks for your responses. Before wasting more time, I think, I will use the Nimbus Sans fonts instead of Helvetica. Nevertheless, the advantage of Helvetica would have been, that the fonts are available in every Acrobat Reader, hence the fonts will not be embedded in the pdf documents, resulting in a smaller file size. But I assume, that the few KB saved space are not worth the work installing original Helvetica fonts.

 

If you're exporting to PDF, I would imagine that you could just type `Helvetica' in the font box and leave it at that. You haven't got to worry about printing, because you aren't printing. In any event, I suspect it would print OK because most printers have this font built in.

 

Unfortunately that's not true. I created an OpenOffice Writer document and formatted the text manually by typing "Helvetica" in the font box. After creating a pdf document the acrobat reader told me, that there is only one font in the pdf document: Nimbus Sans L . Hence, OO Writer seems to replace fonts that are not available on the computer, even if they are standard fonts like Helvetica or Times.