Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 18276
True Type fonts display poorly on Linux
Last modified: 2003-11-20 16:30:38 UTC
MS True Type fonts (Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, etc.) when installed on Linux (Mandrake 9.1, KDE 3.1, GNOME 2.x) display poorly in an OOo document. "Poorly" means here that spaces between words seem not to be there, letters run together, and the cursor appears in the middle of the letter it follows. I have checked this on both 1.1 RC2 and RC3 and see the same behavious. The Bitstream Vera fonts display somewhat better, but not perfectly. If I increase the Zoom percentage to 115% or 120%, the fonts display as one would expect at 100% resolution, however, having the document at these zoom levels is not an acceptabl solution.
I believe this is a freetype issue. It is not present with Lycoris which displays the fonts perfectly.
Hi, I think you are right that this is a system freetype issue. It works fine with my PPC Linux build as well. The bug reporter may want to upgrade to a newer version of freetype and see if that helps. Kevin
I'm not convinced that this is a system font issue, although I haven't been able to spend much time investigating it. I'm on Mandrake 9.1, with all the latest patches, so, as far as I know, I have the latest freetype libraries, which it would appear are the core of this issue. There may be a later non-Mandrake version, and I will look into that, hopefully tomorrow, Sept. 5th (the laptop is at work).
I've downloaded and compiled the freetype2 2.1.4 tarball (Mandrake 9.1 shipped with 2.1.3). I see a slight improvement when using the Bitstream fonts; however, the Times New Roman display is still very poor. Note: I found a version of libfreetype.so.6 in both /opt/OpenOffice.org1.1/program/filter and /opt/OpenOffice.org1.1/program. I renamed them so that OOo would pick up the version in /usr/lib.
I now have a RedHat 9 installation on my home desktop, as well as the Mandrake 9.1 on this laptop - and the RH font display looks fine. RedHat ships with freetype-2.1.3-6, while Mandrake has: rpm -qa |grep freetype freetype2-2.1.3-12mdk freetype-1.3.1-18mdk freetype-tools-1.3.1-18mdk freetype2-devel-2.1.3-12mdk As can be seen from the above, Mandrake has a completely different set-up, and would seem therefore to be the culprit. If another Mandrake user could confirm this it would help... Also, does anyone know if I can rpm -e the Mandrake RPMs and apply the stock rpm as shipped with RH?
reassigned to mci
Since this seems to be a freetype item I'm going to close this Issue now...
closing @des: You may have a look to your distributors homepage or other sites (freshmeat.net, rpmfind.net,...)