Thursday, November 05, 2009

Karmic Koala Ubuntu OWA Font Issues

I just did a fresh install of Karmic Koala, and had a very unexpected issue.

When using Outlook Web Access Light 2007 new items were not showing ion bold text.

Even though I had installed the Microsoft True Type Core Fonts (installable via synaptec as ttf-mscorefonts-installer) I was still seeing the issue.

It turns out that even though I did have the font "Tahoma" which is used by OWA light, it was not displaying Tahoma Bold correctly. this was true in other apps as well, not just Firefox. I reinstalled the corefonts, and refreshed the font cache, no dice.

I guess that MSCorefonts does not include a bolded version of tahoma, which normally gets created on the fly by the OS.

Well this was not working for me.

so I did the following:

downloaded the fonts in cab format:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/ie6sp1/finrel/6_sp1/W98NT42KMeXP/EN-US/IELPKTH.CAB

put it in a NEW folder your home folder. open the terminal, and then enter:

cd (new folder you just made's name)

then

cabextract *.CAB

(this will extract all the file into that folder.)

then

sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/tahoma

then

sudo cp *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/tahoma

then rebuild your font cache

sudo fc-cache -f -v

you should be all set at this point (and please let me know if any of my commands are wrong, I'm going from memory here)

3 comments:

Jos said...

Yup, this works. You may want to remove the "sudo mkdir" from the cp command though. It shouldn't be there.

Jos said...

Oh, and thanks very much. I'm generating business letters on a system that had, until recently, no Tahoma installed. This makes the letters look so much better.

Jim said...

Thanks Jos, copy/paste fail on my part. fixed it.