https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159950
Bug ID: 159950
Summary: Offer to download missing fonts from online sources
Product: LibreOffice
Version: Inherited From OOo
Hardware: All
OS: All
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Severity: enhancement
Priority: medium
Component: LibreOffice
Assignee: libreoffice-bugs@lists.freedesktop.org
Reporter: eyalr...@gmx.com
LibreOffice does not, and probably should not, bundle a large number of fonts,
even if they are distributable, license-wise.
However, there are many fonts which users encounter in documents created by
other office app suites, like MSO, or online document web-apps (like Google's
perhaps?) - and which are available for free download.
Doing so is already considered to have merit for the LO Android viewer (bug
114052) - so why not do it generally?
Certainly, there some reasons one could bring up, e.g. the hassle of
maintaining download locations and possible "protocols" for using them in case
there aren't direct URLs for archives; and even if there are, one needs to
automatically open those archives, extract and install, possibly with privilege
escalation if fonts on the system require root privileges. Still, it's probably
worth it - especially if we consider common fonts in non-Latin languages which
we don't bundle.
Note that the 'alternative' of properly using the font substitution tables:
* Bug 64509: Enhance Font Substitution Table with common commercial and old
fonts
* Bug 120131: Include font substitutions for fonts commonly used in MS Office
for which we bundle alternatives
... usually can't work, because there are no near-equivalent free variants.
This is doubly poignant now that Microsoft has switched from Calibri to Aptos,
while we don't have a metric-equivalent alternative like Carlito, which should
substitute automatically. (And for other languages, we never had metric
equivalence.)
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