Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 4889
Weird font substitution and smart replacement
Last modified: 2003-09-08 16:56:16 UTC
Using the supplied builds of OOo 1.0, " (double quotes) are replaced by question marks. Checking the autocorrect/autoformat option, I noticed that bullets are also replaced by question marks. Even the dash is replaced by question marks. Further checking the insert special character menu I also noticed that the font table is corrupted (though I can use TrueType fonts et al in the document itself, as well as other apps). I'd have to resort to using the Gnome Character map to insert special character.I even turned off replacement of quotes and dashes just to present a remedy. However, I don't have the time to convert even more files created before this happened. Initially this doesn't happen, but after two or three restarts of the program, this happens. I don't know if my setup would influence such in OpenOffice 1.0, but here it is anyway: Debian 2.2, the latest Ximian GNOME, 700MHz Duron processor, XFree 4.1. Any work around to this weird quirk?
I can add that this behaviour is not present for all fonts. My OpenOffice has no installed fonts (actually just one); it takes all its fonts from the X server (centralized X font server actually). I noticed that the URW fonts behave nicely. All URW fonts render both special chars like the special dash, simple and double quotes and some EE characters. Beside URW, few other fonts behave like this. I am not sure why this happens. Also I have checked in gfontsel (a custom xfontsel for GNOME) and I see that many fonts that have ISO8859-2 pages don't work with these characters in OpenOffice. I know OpenOffice uses UTF and switches pages automatically. Again, although some fonts seem to work with ISO2 characters, others simply display a question mark, or an empty box, or empty space in place of the required characters.
Joost->Paolo: please read http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/fontguide.html#8 and mention it here if it helped.
Created attachment 1785 [details] URW "bitstream" font renders long dash badly
Created attachment 1786 [details] URW "bookman l" font renders long dash ok
Created attachment 1787 [details] Bitstream "charter" font renders latin2 characters badly
> Joost->Paolo: please read > http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/fontguide.html#8 and mention it here if > it helped. The problem described in the above link does not seem to be related to this issue. I found out about the RedHat ulT1mo bug the hard way and after eliminating all ulT1mo fonts the issue was still present. Here are some more facts about the bug. Executing "fslsfonts -server unix/:7100 | grep bookman" I get the following: -urw-bookman l-demi bold-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 -urw-bookman l-demi bold-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2 -urw-bookman l-demi bold-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 -urw-bookman l-demi bold-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2 -urw-bookman l-light-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 -urw-bookman l-light-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2 -urw-bookman l-light-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 -urw-bookman l-light-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2 -urw-bookman-demibold-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 -urw-bookman-demibold-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2 -urw-bookman-demibold-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 -urw-bookman-demibold-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2 -urw-bookman-light-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 -urw-bookman-light-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2 -urw-bookman-light-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 -urw-bookman-light-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2 As you can see, I have thwo URW bookman families, the simple "bookman" family and the "bookman l" family. I have created "case1.gif" and "case2.gif" that show the long dash rendering using each of the two fonts. (the comment line for "case1.gif" is wrong, the font is "bookman" not "bitstream"). Both examples contain the same text. The font is changed by selecting the text and then selecting the new text. So, the long dash is ok, but the rendering is wrong for some fonts. Finally, I will attach a "case3.gif" that shows the same text rendered with "bitstream charter" (-bitstream-charter-medium-r-normal), for wich I have iso8859-1, iso8859-2 and iso8859-9 encodings present. As you'll see, the latin2 characters are not rendered correctly. I know, this is a separate issue, but I think the root of the problem might be the same.
Created attachment 1955 [details] Additional data: font size affects the problem
Oops. I should have put this as a comment, rather than as an attachment. Sorry. Just learning to drive this Zilla... I have the same problem with quotes etc using OO 1.0.0 on a Debian Linux laptop, but with a weird twist: Using the Times font, quotes are replaced with question marks at some sizes (e.g. 28 point) but with correct typographic quotes at other sizes (e.g. 26 point). The point size also affect the rendering of dashes. (This was in a presentation imported from SO 5.2.)
Created attachment 2276 [details] A set of tests regarding font rendering
Ok, now 1.0.1 is out and I had to test this issue on 1.0.1. Unfortunately, away it has not gone. I am still confused as to wether this problem is due to bad fonts being installed on Linux or due to OO's inability to choose the right font foundry. The report for my testing is quite extensive so I will attach it as a text file. Mind you, I have used OO 1.0.1 on a RedHat Linux 7.3 i386 box with the Ult1Mo fonts removed (those were problematic and helped no one, that's a certainty). There are no extra fonts installed in OpenOffice. The first question that comes to mind: I am pretty sure that OpenOffice does not use the system fontpath to collect fonts. My fontpath indicates "unix/:7100; tcp/fontserver:7100". My system can see all the fonts from the centralized fontserver, then why can't OpenOffice see them? Or, alternatively, how can I indicate OpenOffice what the correct fontpath is. The second issue, as one can see from my report, most of the trouble comes from bad choice of font foundry. Clearly OpenOffice finds more than one instance of a font in different foundries and makes a choice based on... what? I think users like me would benefit from being able to alter these automatic choices. I took all the fonts from the font selection dropdown except for the dingbats, starbats, starmath, symbol, opensymbol and other non-alphanumeric fonts. I have created a text containing one simple dash (word1 -- word2), a pair of double quotes (autoreplaced by OpenOffice to the ``word'' form) and one long dash (1999--2002). Then a set of ISO-8859-2 specific characters. For each font selection I have tried to show what the result was, what the aspect of the font was (some fonts obviously don't appear antialiased and i thought this might have been important) and what the fonts are present in the fontserver (the ones that might correspond to each font name).
Reassigned to Ulf.
For problems related to Smart Quotes especially on Linux/Unix see also issue 4008. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 4366 ***
As mentioned on the qa dev list on March 5th I will close all resolved duplicate issues. Please see this posting for details. First step in IssueZilla is unfortunately to set them to verified.
As mentioned on the qa dev list on March 5th I will close all resolved duplicate issues. Please see this posting for details.