What fonts necessary to appease standard PDF (from Windows)

[ericx]

I use FreeBSD. I don’t have much knowledge of fonts beyond a legible monospace for terminal and editor. I’ve installed a plethora of fonts on the recommendation of others with the sole intention of accommodation to the vagaries of things thrown at me. I have no art. To that end, I have ~100 fonts. I never use any of them deliberately. I don’t even know what they look like. I’m a network nerd. Fonts are not part of my normal lexicon.

And yet importing PDF always renders something ugly (illegible).

• Given LibreOffice on ~any~ distro.
• Given that M$ rules the world and we must Kowtow (I’ve installed all the Adobe fonts I can find…).
• Which open source fonts (i.e.: Micro$oft matching) need to be installed to allow a graceful (non-hideous) render of PDF?

[oweng]

There is no elegant answer to this question, as the creator of a PDF may use any font. The best that one can hope for is that font subset embedding is used in order to allow the PDF to render as expected (which is, after all, the entire point of PDF). Having stated that, the article here for Ubuntu indicates the main Microsoft fonts and how to obtain them.