Use local fonts for soffice.exe --headless on Windows

[acorn_isle]

Hi, my Windows VM has no fonts installed and I can’t access C:\Windows\Fonts.

Can I get soffice.exe to use fonts in a custom folder? My command is:

soffice.exe --headless --convert-to pdf --outdir "D:\home\site\wwwroot" "D:\home\site\wwwroot\mydoc.docx"

This command is OK on my local machine but on the server it fails with:

No fonts could be found on the system.

I’m trying to convert docs to PDF on an Azure App Service, it’s a Windows VM with no fonts installed. Thanks!

[mikekaganski]

Note that you should not use .exe in your command. Actually, to properly get the console output - e.g. in case of errors - you need to use soffice.com (available since LibreOffice 6.3, see this blog post); if you use usual BAT files, simply using soffice <switches...> <filenames...> - i.e. without explicit extension - uses .com automatically. Or you may use .com explicitly (e.g., when you use the command not from Cmd.exe, but from some other environment, which does not use PATHEXT environment variable).

[mikekaganski]

Yes you can. It partially depends on the Windows version on the VM.

In any case, you may put fonts to share/fonts/truetype under LibreOffice’s installation directory (the directory does not exist initially, create it under pre-existing share). So it would look like this:

<Program Files (or another place where you installed LibreOffice)>
    LibreOffice
        ...
        program
        ...
        share
            ...
            fonts                <= create this
                truetype         <= create this
                    <font1.ttf>
                    <font2.otf>
                    ...

If you are using Windows 10, it allows installing fonts per-user.

[Ninpodeshi]

Mike,
You are a genius!

For me, on Win10 with LO 7.1.2, the font folder was here:
C:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program\resource\common\fonts

I installed 2 fonts to check, and this worked with both!

(The emoji font is not working, but no emoji fonts will work for me. I have had so many problems with Win10 that I’m assuming this is just another Widows issue.)

[mikekaganski]

@Ninpodeshi: program\resource\common\fonts is another directory for internal resources, e.g. for our local copy of OpenSymbol. It was added lately; it is not meant for user additions, but yes, it would work (but I’d still not recommend using it). My answer mentioned another path, that is directly intended for shared user data: share\fonts\truetype.

[Ninpodeshi]

Ok, thank you for the correction. I’ll use that space next time.