I just came across a PowerPoint template which ran fine in LibreOffice, but required a font called "Calibri". Most people know how to install Arial, Verdana etc. which are often in packages called "corefonts" or "msttcorefonts". Calibri however is distributed with Windows Vista, 7, 8 and several Office products. Here's how to get these fonts running on Linux, i.e. my Ubuntu box.

Installation

In short, you need cabextract in order to extract the fonts from the PowerPoint Viewer .exe that Microsoft distributes for free. Then, you can copy them to your local font directory (should be ~/.fonts) or install them globally. There is a handy script which does this for you at plasmasturm.org. You can download and execute this file using

wget http://plasmasturm.org/code/vistafonts-installer/vistafonts-installer
bash vistafonts-installer

Unhinted fonts in Chromium

I had the problem that my browser would display pages that used one of the Vista fonts as pixelated, due to disabled hinting. I found a fix for this problem: You have to change your local font configuration to ignore the embedded bitmaps inside the Microsoft fonts. Depending on your system, you might have the local font configuration at ~/.fonts.conf or use a directory ~/.fonts.conf.d/, in which you can place a new file with the contents

<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
 <dir>~/.fonts</dir>
 <match target="font">
  <test name="family" compare="contains">
   <string>Calibri</string>
   <string>Cambria</string>
   <string>Candara</string>
   <string>Consolas</string>
   <string>Corbel</string>
   <string>Constantia</string>
  </test>
  <edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
   <bool>false</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
</fontconfig>