How to install Colibri and other new Vista fonts on a Mac
Microsoft has licensed new fonts for Office 2007 and Vista. These fonts look great and are a nice change to the standard and over-used Tahoma and Verdana. (At least, you’re not using Comic Sans, right?)
However, you have a Mac, and you think it deserves to have those nice fonts too. Installing them is simple: buy a copy of Office 2008 for Mac and install it. Unfortunately, the simplest solution is the most expensive.
There’s another way to obtain those fonts. It may not be as simple as the method mentioned above, but don’t worry, there’s no technical tweeking needed.
Office 2004 for Mac has no support for documents saved in the new Open XML format. For this reason, Microsoft released the Open XML File Format Converter for Office 2004, available for free at Mactopia. This package contains the fonts you want which you can install manually, even if you don’t have any version of Office installed on your Mac.
I’m not certain if installing these fonts manually is allowed by their EULA, however, and I do ask you read the licence before carrying out the instructions below.
To install the fonts, download the disk image via the link above. Once downloaded, mount the image, and right-click or option-click the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac package file and select “Show Package Contents.” In the package, browse in Contents, then Packages. Right-click the OpenXML_all_fonts.pkg package and select “Show Package Contents” again. In that package, open in Contents folder, and copy the Archive.pax.gz file to your Desktop. Double-click the file to decompress its folder. Once done, the new Archive.pax folder should open automatically, containing all the font files you want. Open the Font Book utility, create a new collection called “Vista” (if you wish), and drag all the fonts files in the window.
That’s it. The new Vista fonts should be installed, ready to be used in any of your applications!