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Write to us at Linux Format, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA or lxf.letters@futurenet.com.
What will IBM do with Red Hat? How to make Linux more accessible? What fonts can you use? And more Arch, please!
More accessible
I can just imagine it now: your front cover depicting Tux in a wheelchair and his flipper in a sling. Awww!
I just discovered how difficult it is to type with my right hand in plaster following surgery. So I got to thinking whether you could consider an issue of LXF containing an article on accessibility options. There are just a few ideas here, but I’m sure you could improve on my list.
How can I fix ‘sticky keys’ on my Lubuntu laptop? What is the best voice-assistant for writing and reading text? Is there an easy to use screen magnifier? How to remap the buttons on a mouse? Setting up a touch screen… and so on. I know that some of these options are available to, er, ‘other’ PC systems, but where is Nurse Tux when we need her/ him most? It was a real struggle for me to type this. Pete, Northumberland UK
Neil says
This is certainly something I’ve always wanted to cover, but unless we had someone with experience or expertise it always felt as if we’d just be paying the topic lip service, rather than giving genuine advice. Hopefully this is something we can dig into in a future issue.
Font of knowledge
I’m a high-school teacher, and a long-time Linux user. On my personal laptop, an Asus Vivobook, I run Linux Mint 19.1 Cinnamon and it works beautifully. I have two office suites on my laptop: Libreoffice 6.1.5 and
WPS Office. Why two? I prefer Libreoffice for my own use, and I use Write and Impress to create assignments and presentations for my students.
I run into problems when I send a document that I created in either suite with the default font to a colleague or a student. Font conversion in Word or
Powerpoint screws up the document, sometimes a little, sometimes a little too much. So my question is this: can I legally copy the Windows Truetype fonts from my Windows 10 computer and install them on
my Linux laptop? That way, I could change the default font to Calibri, the default font in the latest iteration of Microsoft Office, and avoid the font conversion problems.
Doing this would certainly make life easier, and I realise I could copy the fonts at any time and no one would be the wiser – but since one of the courses I teach includes a unit on ethics, I have to know I’m doing the right thing. Michael, Florida, USA
Neil says
Good question! You’re able to install the Microsoft Core Web Fonts with:
sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer
The problem is that this requires accepting a Microsoft EULA and does not include Calibri, which there’s no ethical way of obtaining. Some point out that it’s bundled with the free Powerpoint Viewer, but that doesn’t strike us as being the intended use. Google has created drop-in replacements that are near-identical – you can install them with:
sudo apt install fonts-crosextra-carlito fonts-crosextracaladea You can read up more on using these at http://bit. ly/lxf252fonts – and we also discovered a treasure trove of free fonts at https://fonts.google.com along the way!
Arch designs
Would it be possible to include Arch Linux on your next coverdisc, please? Anthony Bradley, email
Jonni says
When we ran the Arch feature in LXF249 we did think about including Arch on the disc, but in the end it’s not really worth it. The Arch ISO is pretty small, around 900MB. Fair enough, that’s still a lot for people without the luxury of fast internet, but even if we did include it all it does is boot to a shell prompt.
You then need to install the thing, which involves downloading several gigabytes of packages! Back to square one, in other words. (I think he means “No”, in other words – Ed)