Install XP and Vista Fonts on Linux

One reason why Microsoft Powerpoint looks much nicer on screen compared to OpenOffice.Org Impress because Powerpoint use Microsoft proprietary TTFs (true type font).

We could actually copy all Microsoft TTF into our Linux system easily. Just copy all *.TTF file from XP or Vista, and put it into ~/.fonts , and then type fc-cache .

Create .fonts Directory
Make sure that you have .fonts directory at home. If you dont have one, create it :

mkdir ~/.fonts

Obtaining Microsoft Windows XP Fonts
Since I have XP (running in VMware) I could simply cd to c:\windows\font and copy all *.ttf to a shared folder (via SAMBA) then have them copied into ~/.fonts

Obtaining Microsoft Windows Vista Fonts
I dont have Vista, but follow the following procedure to obtain Vista true type fonts :

wget http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/5/a/f5a3df76-d856-4a61-a6bd-722f52a5be26/PowerPointViewer.exe
sudo apt-get install cabextract
cabextract PowerPointViewer.exe
cabextract ppviewer.cab

Then copy all *.ttf into ~/.fonts

Update Fonts Cache
Just issue fc-cache to use all new fonts stored at ~/.fonts

fc-cache

Benefit
One main benefit of using Microsoft TTF is that we could open almost every PPT (powerpoint) files using OpenOffice, and display it without error on the formatting.