Next year’s LibreOffice 26.2 open-source office suite is set to better handle documents with restricted embedded fonts. This is for dealing with situations where fonts may have restricted licensing rights and where up to now LibreOffice Writer simply hasn’t dealt with them correctly.
Opened back in 2021 was a bug report over the lack of information exposed to the user when some embedded fonts can’t be used due to license restrictons on said embedded fonts:
“The sample file that the user provided (see attachment) contained embedded fonts, including Bebas Neue; however, on my system (where this font was absent), the file didn’t use the embedded font for text rendering.
The issue was that the embedded font had restricted licensing rights, that got detected in EmbeddedFontsHelper::sufficientTTFRights, and loading the file was (rightfully) rejected.
However, there’s no way for user to know that. It looks as if LibreOffice doesn’t work correctly.
The proposal is to implement an infobar, that would tell something like “some fonts embedded in the document couldn’t be loaded due to restricted licensing rights”.”
Merged this week to LibreOffice Git for the LibreOffice 26.2 cycle (too late for the imminent LibreOffice 25.8 release) is initial support for dealing with documents containing restricted embedded fonts. Mike Kaganski of Collabora worked through improving the behavior for this cross-platform, open-source office suite. The merge explains the new behavior for dealing with these restricted fonts:
“Initial support for docs with restricted embedded fonts
Previously, we silently discarded fonts which rights disallowed editing of documents. This change introduces a choice, where user can opt to either discard the restricted fonts, or switch to read-only mode.
1. When user opens a document with restricted embedded fonts, which are already installed on the system, those fonts are not considered as restricted.
2. Trying to switch to edit mode will show the dialog again, allowing to discard those fonts to allow editing.
3. Saving the document will discard restricted fonts not installed on the system in any case.”
