Low font quality in openoffice

Message

Luc484 · Post by **Luc484** » Tue Mar 14, 2006 7:49 am

Hi. It's been some months now since I started to try to solve this problem, but still can't find anything. It's not a real problem, but it bothers. I'm having this probem with openoffice compiled from sources on my laptop. Each version I tried had this same exact problem. The text in the menus, and in every other window in openoffice is strange, low quality: this is a screenshot. I can't understand, I tried many options, but nothing worked. I tried to make it just like the openoffice I compiled on my desktop, which looks perfect, but it simply seems it is not possible. Kde fonts are perfect instead. Only openoffice is showing this problem. Can someone suggest me something for this issue? Any other thread maybe? I found nothing yet.
Thanks.

badchien · Post by **badchien** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 1:04 am

I had that problem at one point. I'm pretty sure I fixed it by installing more/better fonts. Start with corefonts. I can't remember whether ooo finds the new fonts automatically or if you have to tell it about them with spadmin.

First just emerge corefonts and restart ooo and maybe X too and see what happens.

Luc484 · Post by **Luc484** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 6:17 am

I see I have corefonts-1-r2 already installed on my system. Could I need some other fonts?

badchien · Post by **badchien** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 6:31 am

Hmmm.. I also have freefonts and sharefonts. Do you have those?

Also, does openoffice have access to the corefonts? For instance, in a document, can you set the font to arial, courier, impact, etc?

Luc484 · Post by **Luc484** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 6:52 am

badchien wrote:Hmmm.. I also have freefonts and sharefonts. Do you have those?

I lacked sharefonts. emerged and restarted X. Nothing changed.

badchien wrote:Also, does openoffice have access to the corefonts? For instance, in a document, can you set the font to arial, courier, impact, etc?

Yes, I can. But it seems the fonts are ok in the document, it's only a problem of openoffice windows. I mean: I set the same font for both the document and in kcontrol for X (Bitstream Vera Sans), and fonts are ok in kde and in the document itself, but they are screwed up in openoffice menus and windows.

badchien · Post by **badchien** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 8:47 am

I understand, I was just making sure OOo knew of their existance.

What version of OOo are you using?

Does changing font settings under Tools > Options, Openoffice.org > View have any effect? (Use system font... ai, etc).
You seem to have a different font problem than I had. I remember mine being easier to fix

Luc484 · Post by **Luc484** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 9:09 am

badchien wrote:What version of OOo are you using?

2.0.2, but I had the same problems with older versions as well. I don't remember if it was the same with 1.1. I remember that before upgrading to 2.0 I had another well-known problem. Icons were black. I found many solutions in the forum, but none worked. Before I could solve the problem the upgrade solved the icon issue, but I still have a graphic problem. I don't know whether these issues could be related or not.

badchien wrote:Does changing font settings under Tools > Options, Openoffice.org > View have any effect? (Use system font... ai, etc).
You seem to have a different font problem than I had. I remember mine being easier to fix

Yes, it does have effects. But none is solving the problem. Fonts are strange. I configured it the same way I set my version of openoffice on the desktop which is the working one.
Any other ideas?
Thanks for your help.

badchien · Post by **badchien** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 1:51 am

You might try going backwards to 2.0.1. I've seen a lot of reports of font-related trouble with 2.0.2 specifically.

I don't know what else to try. You could check the ooo forums for more ideas.
http://www.oooforum.org/

Luc484 · Post by **Luc484** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 6:36 am

badchien wrote:You might try going backwards to 2.0.1. I've seen a lot of reports of font-related trouble with 2.0.2 specifically.

The problem is here from 2.0.0 at least.

badchien wrote:I don't know what else to try. You could check the ooo forums for more ideas.
http://www.oooforum.org/

I'll try there, thanks anyway.

EDIT:
I found this on the forum: http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic ... highlight= . I hope a solution will be found.

Luc484 · Post by **Luc484** » Sun Mar 19, 2006 2:27 pm

eh eh, I found something interesting right now. It seems the problem is related to the size of the fonts used. I mean that I was using Bitstream Vera Sans as kde font, with a size of 12pts. I tried changing the size from the KDE control center to 11 and now the font is perfect under openoffice. It is smaller but its quality is ok. I noticed another strange thing I can't explain: it seems that openoffice does something strange to the fonts used by kde. I mean that I see the fonts are bigger than those used by kde, whatever size I set in kcontrol. Characters in openoffice are bigger than those used everywhere else in kde. Why does it resize the fonts used by kde?

tam · Post by **tam** » Mon Mar 20, 2006 6:04 pm

KDE font size does not matter in my case. OOo fonts look horrible.

Gentoonie · Post by **Gentoonie** » Mon Mar 20, 2006 6:23 pm

This seems to be related to the 2.0.2 release. Im not sure which version i used before, but it was 2.X. There i had no problems with fonts. I updatet to 2.0.2 today and i just looks so terrible. Theres nothing i can do about it till now... =/

Kabuto · Post by **Kabuto** » Mon Mar 20, 2006 6:32 pm

My 2.0.2 under KDE looks fine. Do you have anything in the font override table in Options?

Epyon · Post by **Epyon** » Mon Mar 20, 2006 6:33 pm

Well its good to know I'm not alone. The fonts in OO.o 2.0.2 look horrible on my computer. Sucks.

Luc484 · Post by **Luc484** » Mon Mar 20, 2006 6:34 pm

It seems this problem has no solution for the moment, and I don't know whether this is my problem too or not. Anyway I think you should follow the link I reported above, they are talking about this on the oo forum.

GoingDown · Post by **GoingDown** » Mon Mar 20, 2006 8:01 pm

Have you tried to change setting "Use System font for user interface" which can be found in Tools/Options/Openoffice.org/View?

Aysen · Post by **Aysen** » Mon Mar 20, 2006 8:28 pm

This might be related to OOo being a GTK+ application running in KDE. Try to emerge x11-themes/gtk-engines-qt (and maybe x11-themes/gtk-engines-qtpixmap) and play with KDE's Control Center -> Look&Feel -> GTK Styles and Fonts. It should setup font sizes for OOo properly. Works for me

Luc484 · Post by **Luc484** » Mon Mar 20, 2006 9:00 pm

GoingDown wrote:Have you tried to change setting "Use System font for user interface" which can be found in Tools/Options/Openoffice.org/View?

Yes, already tried that. But it changes the fonts which are no more the same of kde.

GoingDown wrote:This might be related to OOo being a GTK+ application running in KDE. Try to emerge x11-themes/gtk-engines-qt (and maybe x11-themes/gtk-engines-qtpixmap) and play with KDE's Control Center -> Look&Feel -> GTK Styles and Fonts. It should setup font sizes for OOo properly. Works for me

I'm already using gtk-to-qt and I already set it up in kcontrol. I'm using "Use my KDE style in GTK applications" and "Use my kde fonts in GTK applications", and it seems to work for every other app.

sohni · Post by **sohni** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 10:15 am

I have had the same problems with OOo.

I 'solved' it like this:
First I set OOo to use system font.
The font is a lot larger than the one used by KDE and ugly
Then I set OOo interface font size (scaling) to 95%
Close OOo and open OOo.
Fonts are fine.

'Hope this helps.

Luc484 · Post by **Luc484** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 10:21 am

Hey, great guy! It seems this is working. Thanks.

Gentoonie · Post by **Gentoonie** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 11:21 am

This solution doesn't apply to non-KDE environements. I just tried it and all that changed was the font size itself, but it stays ugly all the time.

Luc484 · Post by **Luc484** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 11:29 am

Ok, should I remove the [Solved] tag maybe as the problem has not been completely solved?

Gentoonie · Post by **Gentoonie** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 1:10 pm

yea i think this would encourage more people to read the topic

shuusaku · Post by **shuusaku** » Fri Mar 24, 2006 3:14 pm

...but I'm a complete beginner, so I'm not sure how much it depends on my poor knowledge of the whole thing.

Anyhow, the problem of poor fonts in OO could be "solved" by unchecking the tag "screen font antialiasing" in Tools | Options | openoffice.org | View

Luc484 · Post by **Luc484** » Fri Mar 24, 2006 3:37 pm

Before solving my problem I tried that but it was not a good solution for me. Without the anti-aliasing I had poor quality on the document too.

Low font quality in openoffice

Low font quality in openoffice

same problem for me...