Embedding fonts in LibreOffice documents

[gdt]

LibreOffice 4.1 allows the fonts used by Writer, Impress and so on to be embedded into the document. This removes the largest impediment to using the large number of excellent free fonts which have appeared in the past few years. The result is documents that look much, much better.

The user interface hides this in the per-document configuration: File | Properties | Font | Embed fonts in the document.

PDF remains the best format for exchanging completed documents, simply because PDF readers are available on almost every device.

On the downside, outputting files into the ePub format still uses a difficult plugin. It would be very nice if Writer handled ePub as a first class document format such as .DOC or .DOCX.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hi

It's going in the right direction. However we are only half way.

I doubt this feature would be very handy for small documents but it could very well be convenient for books. Even then, if I embed a full ttf regular and italic font (not to speak about bold and bolditalic) the size of my book may go from say 300k to 1.5 meg of more (Let put aside here illustrations, I only speak about text). The nice new OTF fonts are fully featured, with ligatures and so on, but may have a respectable size.

I am used to publish EPUB with embedded fonts. To avoid this dramatic increase of size, I only embed font subsets. You can do that wery easily using (even woth a command line) the polish f0nction of calibre. As far as I can see, LibreOffice does not provide yet the possibility of subsetting embedded fonts.

So, I am guessing that this new feature will be seldom used until this glorious day happens...

[vk5tu.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that font subsets are that useful for documents intended to be altered.

[(Anonymous)]

Subsets are relevant for example in Impress Presentations that are finalised and need to be shared, where bandwidth is a concern, such as within collaboration software.

[vk5tu.livejournal.com]

But then the receiver can't modify the presentation. I can understand subsets within a read-only format, such as PDF, but I can't see that they make much sense for the source format.