Installing Type1 fonts for OpenOffice

My wife has a binary encoded Type1 font (a .pfb and a .pfm file) that contains symbols for guitar tab notation. It came with some Windows software, and obviously in Windows the .pfb file and .pfm file are enough to use the font.

Right clicking the .pfb file in KDE let's you install the font, but it doesn't show up in OpenOffice's font selector. KWord on the other hand let's you use it.

After some googling I found out that OpenOffice in Linux needs an accompanying .afm file, and here's how to create the .afm file from the .pfb file:

• Install t1lib, a library for generating character- and string-glyphs from Adobe Type 1 fonts: sudo apt-get install t1lib-bin


• Go to the directory where the .pfb file was installed, e.g.: cd ~/.fonts


• Create the .afm file, e.g.: type1afm fontfile.pfb

And that's all, starting OpenOffice should now show the font in the font selector.

Alternatively, the .afm file can go to a subdirectory named afm.

When showing OpenOffice to my wife on her new Dell Inspiron 6400 (which I configured to be more or less the same as the Inspiron E1505n Dell offers in the US with Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed, and Suzan also successfully upgraded to Ubuntu) I wondered that the Letter Wizard didn't work. I remembered configuring OpenOffice to use Sun's Java5 as JRE on my computer instead of the FSF 1.4.2 version already installed.

Obviously, the wizards do depend on Java, but it doesn't say you need Sun's Java or Java5 ...

So, after installing Sun's Java5 via adept and configuring OpenOffice to use that as JRE, it worked!