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For work, I have to deal with Powerpoint docuements from diverse sources.

I open them in LibreOffice Impress, and I always have the following problem: fonts are much larger than in the original Powerpoint document, resulting in bad formating, texts out of boxes, etc.

I guess I'm not the only one with this problem, but I couldn't find any comprehensive description of the mechanisms involved, nor any solution, exept going on every slide to change every font size...

Notice I have msttf core fonts (arial, etc...) installed, but I think some fonts used (by default) in Powerpoint are not included in this font set.

So my question: is there a way to set a better default font size when importing from Powerpoint to Impress ?

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It is not font size that is affected. If you do not have the font installed that was used for the presentation, then it is a matter of setting a substitute font that has similar metrics as the original font. Indeed, depending on the metrics of the font, one font may take substantially more place than another font, and even look larger, at the same font size.

Under Options, LibreOffice - Fonts, you can define which fonts should be substituted for a font that you do not have. To activate the Replacement Table, check "Apply replacement table". From then on, you can define fonts, indicate replacement fonts and add these to the table.

Each font is unique, and therefore, the most suitable substitute font depends on each individual font. There is "general" way to automatically set the best substitute font (which, moreover, depends on the fonts you have on your system.

Substituting two common Microsoft fonts

If you have to work with documents coming from a Microsoft Office product, changes are high that it uses either the Calibri or Cambria fonts. These are the regular sans-serif and serif fonts of MS Office, introduced in 2007. In contrast to the previous "generation" of Microsoft fonts, that included "Arial" and "Times New Roman", the license of these newer fonts is more restricted. Therefore, these fonts cannot be used freely on Linux. Google produced two fonts, Carlito and Caladea, that have similar metrics of the two commonly used Microsoft fonts, and therefore can be used as substitutes for these. They can be installed on Ubuntu with the command sudo apt install fonts-crosextra-carlito fonts-crosextra-caladea. (Thanks to user alci to point this out)

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  • Your post also allowed me to find this wiki.debian.org/SubstitutingCalibriAndCambriaFonts on how to set substitue for Calibri and Cambria.
    – alci
    Jan 29, 2020 at 20:52
  • Also, installing fonts-wine brings a free Tahoma metrics compatible font from wine, which is widely used in (older ?) MS Office documents.
    – alci
    Jan 29, 2020 at 20:58
  • Thank you! I will add this specific information to the question so the information can benefit future readers.
    – vanadium
    Jan 30, 2020 at 8:14

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