I have searched the Internet for answers to this question, and find a lot of confusing answers.
I have had Linux Fedora 20 installed on my wife's computer, dual boot with Windows, and suggested LibreOffice as an alternative to the Microsoft Word that she has been using. Unfortunately there is no LibreOffice equivalent of the font she likes. She had bought Word on a disk with the computer, so it seems that the obvious way out is for her to use Word from within Linux, possibly with "wine".
I have not used wine before.
I am reluctant for her to want to go back to Windows, after having Linux installed, with the speed, freedom from attack, and stability she now enjoys.
So, my question is: please, how do we go about this?
Best Answer
LibreOffice is a far cry from being compatible with Office. Excel compatibility isn't too bad for calculations, but LibreOffice Writer and Impress can't cope with formatting from Word and Powerpoint. Libreoffice and MS Office are roughly equivalent in functionality, but if you need formatting compatibility, you need to use the same software. (I wish it wasn't the case, but I have to use MS Office for work because I have to work with people who use MS Office.)
You can copy the fonts from Windows to Linux — just drop the files in the directory
~/.fonts. But fonts aren't the only problem.Wishing to avoid Windows and run Word directly in Wine looks attractive on paper. But Wine isn't a panacea: it tries to be compatible, but emulating a whole huge, incompletely-documented operating system is an impossible task. There will always be incompatibilities.
Dual boot is very bad user experience: switching between operating systems takes a long time. Dual boot was something we did in the 1990s because individuals or even small institutions couldn't afford virtual machines. It is an obsolete concept.
Run Windows in a virtual machine. I believe that current licenses allow running one instance of Windows, either on the bare metal or inside a virtual machine (but check your license, especially as there are many different editions of Windows). Of the major VM software, VirtualBox is the easiest to get running for this kind of casual use. So install Windows and Office inside a VirtualBox machine. Use Windows just for the software that requires it — do your browsing, file management, etc. in Linux.