Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 24833
Excel doc cells have to be vertical aligned to middle
Last modified: 2004-02-12 15:04:02 UTC
When you open an Excel file with Calc you have to do a Select All>Format Cells> on the Alignment tab change the Vertical alignment to middle... Otherwise the top of all the cell content is slightly under the row above it. See attached screenshot...
Created attachment 12730 [details] Excel file opened in Calc
could you attach the actual Excel file text.xls to this issue. thanks.
I've noticed this in some Writer text boxes as well, but it's worse in Calc. I'm also running linux using 1.1.1a.
Created attachment 12743 [details] This is the actual test file that I made in Excel and took the screenshot with it open in OO.
Hi John, it seems to be a problem with the fonts used on the machine. For further informations about this please ask US. Frank
Thanks Frank. And thanks to Ulf (US) help, I have some understanding of this. I have been unable to re-create this on some Linux distributions but I am informed that this can be reproduced with SuSe LES 8 (Linux Enterprise Server) with a self-compiled XFree86 version 4.3.99.902 (4.4.0 RC 2). The problem occurs when 'Arial' falls back to an unscaled 'Helvetica' XFont. The workaround here is to select 'Use printer metrics for Text formatting' in Tools->Options->Spreadsheet->General. The other issue that Ulf mentioned is that the visibility of this problem is related to the zoom level. Pressing the CTRL key and moving the mouse wheel forward and back, makes this issue appear/disappear. The issue to investigate for me is why Calc falls back from 'Arial' to 'Helvetica' and not to 'Bitstream Vera Sans'. Submitter can you confirm the workaround and the fonts used. The screenshot is unforunately a read-only version and does not display your font.
I just saw the problem on US's computer and the problem is a combination of - the spreadsheet uses the Arial font - the Arial font is not available on the computer - the fallback font for Arial is Helvetica which is most probably not a scalable font. The verify this please attach the result of the command "xlsfonts | grep -i helvetica" => a perfectly matching Helvetica font is not available for the display, so the best matching font is used. A scalable Helvetica is available on the printer, so a printout will look ok. Workarounds: Either - install the Arial font - install a scalable Helvetica font - use another font in the spreadsheet, e.g. BitStream Vera Sans OOo doesn't fallback from Arial to BitStreamVeraSans because they are not as metrically compatible as Arial is to Helvetica. Even if BSVSS was available in the current font fallback list for Arial the Helvetica fallback would still be prefered.
Created attachment 12772 [details] "xlsfonts | grep -i helvetica > xlsfonts_helvetica.txt"
HDU->US: Thanks. As expected the Helvetica available on this system is not scalable and e.g. the pixel sizes 9, 13, 15, 16, 19, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 and anything bigger or equal 35 are missing. When somebody requests a Helvetica with e.g. 16 pixels VCL tries to do its best to match the request with what is actually available, but it simply cannot invent fonts that have not been installed.
Thanks for all the contributions to this. I would like to close this 'wfm'. The workarounds outlined by HDU justify this.
mark as closed
Back to QA.
Changing resolution to worksforme
Closed because worksforme.