Problem displaying Powerpoint presentation in Libre Office Impress

I had an interesting issue displaying a Powerpoint presentation using the Impress presentation program in Libre Office. Although Libre Office has no problem opening the .pptx file from Microsoft Office 2010 the slide layout was wrong and text was overflowing.

The reason was that the font in the original Powerpoint file did not exist on the other machine, which was running Linux Mint 16. Impress was substituting with a similar font which was not as condensed so the text was overflowing the original Powerpoint layout. This surprised me as I had already installed the Microsoft Core Fonts. However, this does not include Calibri which is the default font in MS Office 2010 and the font which had been used in these slides. To fix this I copied the Calibri true type font files from my Windows 7 laptop over to the Linux one.

Here is how to do it.

Note: Your system may not be set up like mine. Attempting this could break something. Beware.

On the Windows PC:

• Go to c://Windows/Fonts
• Click on Calibri, which is a font folder.
• Copy all six Calibri files to a USB memory stick.

On the Linux PC:

• Copy the files to /home/[username]/ using whatever file manager you have.
• I put them in a directory called Microsoft
• Open terminal and type: 

su

• You will be asked for your password.
• This switches you to root user.
• Then type:

cp -r /home/[username]/Microsoft /usr/share/fonts

This copies the fonts into your font directory.

• Now type:

fc-cache -fv

Which refreshes your font cache.


For information, the way to install the standard Microsoft fonts is to use this command:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts