Fonts? What fonts?

[woody649]

I was reminded (again) that Windows 10 will reach end-of-life in October of 2025. Sure, that's more than two years in the future, but time flies when you're having fun ... or just trying to survive. My situation is that I have three desktop computers, two laptops, and two tablets running Windows 10 ... and not one of them meets the minimum specifications to run Windows 11 (even if I wanted to run Windows 11 -- which I don't.)

I can't afford to replace seven computers, so that means it's time to start doing some homework.

I write books and self-publish through Amazon KDP and Barnes and Noble Press. Despite pronouncements of doom from many people on writers' and desktop publishing forums that you "can't" properly format a book for print using Microsoft Word ... that's what I do. I know that there are minor technical flaws in my books from a typesetting/layout perspective, but 99.73% of readers will never notice, so I'm not worried about it.

Because as an author I try to respect the copyrights of other creators of intellectual property, I won't pirate fonts. But when it comes to fonts and the permissions, there are some quirks. Windows includes a lot of fonts, and Microsoft Office adds more fonts. If you use Windows Professional and/or any of the professional flavors of Office (Office Pro, Office Home & Business, or Office Enterprise) you can use the fonts provided by Microsoft for any commercial purpose. However, if you have Windows Home or Office Home & Student, you CAN'T (legally) use those same fonts for commercial purposes.

So what happens if I start a book on my desktop computer, running Windows Professional and Office Professional, but I finish the book on a laptop running Windows Home and Office Home & Student? Or, just to mix it up a bit, a laptop running Windows Home but Office Home & Business?

Anyhoo ... to do anything useful with these infernal devices, we need fonts. For those of you who have switched to some flavor of Linux -- what do you do for fonts? After reading as much as I can digest about variations of Linux, it seems most of the distros come with LibreOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird. And I know my non-Microsoft office suite of choice, SoftMaker Office, is available for Linux. But nobody mentions fonts.

Does Linux come with fonts, or do you have to download what you want from Font Squirrel?