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Accepted
Xavi Montero
Asked: 2015-02-26 06:08:46 +0800 CST

LibreOffice command line font substitution at pptx to pdf conversion

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Question

Is there any way to specify to libreoffice, via commandline, to use Cambria for occurences of Calibri in the PDF generation without the need of any user-interaction?

Context

I am using this command:

libreoffice --headless --invisible --convert-to pdf --outdir images/output/ images/Mockups.pptx

or this one:

unoconv -f pdf -o images/output/ images/Mockups.pptx

to automatically convert a PPTX to PDF in a virtualbox machine launched with vagrant running ubuntu/trusty64.

Vagrantfile:

config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
[...]
config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install -y unoconv imagemagick default-jdk ant docbook-xsl fop libxml2-utils xsltproc php5-cli
SHELL

The original pptx is edited by people using windows and uses the Calibri font. I can't require them to use different settings or fonts.

As the Calibri font is not in the trusty distribution, the PDF conversion done by the libreoffice messes the layout.

I've read Cambria is metric-equivalent to Calibri.

So, as stated, the question is how to instruct libreoffice for a certain font substitution via command line.

command-line

2 Answers

  1. We had a similar issue with LibreOffice under Alfresco (which also runs headless). Installing the ChromeOS fonts packages for Carlito (Calibri equivalent) and Caladea (Cambria equivalent) fixed it, using a hint from here: https://wiki.debian.org/SubstitutingCalibriAndCambriaFonts. Changing the mappings within LO did nothing, neither on the headless nor on the desktop - only installing the packages solved it. (For completeness, we had added the entries for the mappings to the LO registrymodifications.xcu and that achieved nothing, on either platform - editing the files under conf.d takes precedence, it seems).

    Packages installed were:

    Note: $ below is the system prompt...

    Linux:

    $ sudo apt-get install fonts-crosextra-carlito fonts-crosextra-caladea

    FreeBSD: (Hint:do the search first as name may change over time)

    $ pkg search cros

    $ sudo pkg install crosextrafonts-caladea-20130214_1 crosextrafonts-carlito-20130920_2

    You may need to run:

    $ fc-cache -r

    Check with:

    $ fc-match Calibri

    Carlito-Regular.ttf: "Carlito" "Regular"

    $ fc-match Cambria

    Caladea-Regular.ttf: "Caladea" "Regular"

    Works perfectly now.

    These installs create the following files which give the desired font substitutions (depending on your platform):

    Linux (Ubuntu 14.x):

    /etc/fonts/conf.avail/30-0-google-crosextra-caladea-fontconfig.conf

    /etc/fonts/conf.avail/30-0-google-crosextra-carlito-fontconfig.conf

    These are linked from /etc/fonts/conf.d like so:

    30-0-google-crosextra-caladea-fontconfig.conf -> ../conf.avail/30-0-google-crosextra-caladea-fontconfig.conf

    30-0-google-crosextra-carlito-fontconfig.conf -> ../conf.avail/30-0-google-crosextra-carlito-fontconfig.conf

    FreeBSD (10.x):

    /usr/local/etc/fonts/conf.avail/30-metric-aliases.conf

    ...linked ala...

    /usr/local/etc/fonts/conf.d/30-metric-aliases.conf@ -> /usr/local/etc/fonts/conf.avail/30-metric-aliases.conf

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  2. Best Answer

    The pptx file format is just a zip file with a different extension, you could try unzipping it and doing a text substitution:

    unzip -d tmp Mockups.pptx
find tmp -type f | xargs sed -i 's/Calibri/Cambria/g'
( cd tmp; zip -r ../Mockups2.pptx . )
rm -Rf tmp
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