I thought that the fonts you could use in an office suite depended on the office suite, but it appears I'm wrong. I have both OpenOffice.org 1.1 and StarOffice 6.0 installed on both my Windows and Linux partitions, and they each have different fonts, depending on the OS. The Windows versions have a much larger selection of fonts, including the classic "Times New Roman" as default. The ones that I get to pick from while in Linux, well...they suck! How come us Linux users get the shaft when it comes to decent fonts?

i just copy my windows fonts to my linux installation.

How do you do that?

Pen and paper.

smb. or copy/ftp/copy whatever is more convenient at the moment

I'm very happy to announce that I did it! This may be the most difficult thing I've done in Linux so far (not that big of a deal for you pros ).

Why however doesn't Linux use the same fonts natively? I saw one site (fonts.com) that was selling Times New Roman (TTF version) for $42 If this font was made for The Times British newspaper, what makes anyone think they have a right to sell those fonts (other than the newspaper, naturally)? And that didn't include bold or italic versions, which were also the same price. It's cheaper just to buy Windows and copy them. I just want to know why Linux doesn't come packaged w/ them

The simple reason is because fonts are copyrighted and the ones that come with Windows aren't released for free. Some are, and can be downloaded from their site, but they are fewer than they used to be (they've removed some).

There are a lot of public domain fonts out there to download, but they are often not of the same quality as the ones you pay for. They are often missing special characters and bold/italic version etc.

The best way is probably to find a font package somewhere unless you have Windows.

[]Gardener said:
The simple reason is because fonts are copyrighted and the ones that come with Windows aren't released for free. Some are, and can be downloaded from their site, but they are fewer than they used to be (they've removed some).

There are a lot of public domain fonts out there to download, but they are often not of the same quality as the ones you pay for. They are often missing special characters and bold/italic version etc.

The best way is probably to find a font package somewhere unless you have Windows. [/]

I'm just confused because Microsoft didn't create Times New Roman. I read that it was created for the newspaper The Times, in London. So how does MS get these fonts and not other OSs? Maybe they just pay a small fee. I don't know.

Here's some historical information about Times New Roman. It says that MS licenses it from another company: http://www.truetype.demon.co.uk/articles/times.htm

Fonts can come in many versions and if the name isn't protected, someone can create a font of their own and call it by that name. So there can be many versions of a font with the same name and they can be similar but have some small differences. So the Microsoft version of Times New Roman is copyrighted by them, but there can exist other versions as well.