The "Times" font that comes with RedHat 9 when used in OpenOffice displays a ? when it should display a " character.
To fix this I copied over the windows times.ttf font to the OpenOffice's share/fonts directory. I can see the Times New Roman font fine and use it.
The only problem with the Windows Times New Roman font (and the Arial one i copied over) is that when I bold or italisize a character it doesn't display differently. I had this same problem in Mandrake 9 with the Windows Times New Roman font.

What am I doing wrong and how can I fix this?

I already did what was said on the article below:
http://theregus.com/content/4/26770.html

And I've read through the TLDP font de-ugly page and it doesn't mention this issue. I didn't fix my system using that method because it's not up to date for RedHat9. Anyways I'm only trying to get a good working version of Times on the RedHat 9 box.

Any suggestions?

also, which distro is best for fonts and using OpenOffice?

I know mandrake 9.0's default Times actually works.

any ideas?

i checked the default openoffice.org which comes with RH9
OO 1.0.2 and the Times font works properly.

why is it not working in 1.1?

you can always copy the microsoft fonts over & use them
works a treat

Something that I have noticed when playing around with fonts, for example, if you use the "cabextract" and "msttcorefonts" packages, (instead of just copying the fonts over,as you can with mandrake) you see stuff that doesn't seem quite right.

i.e. you presume that if you change from a normal font, and just select bold to highlight something, you are just modifying those particular characters.

As far as I can work out, you're not. It would appear that say you are using "arial" for the normal typing of a document, and then you "embolden" something, you have in fact used two different fonts. In other words, you have typed the main document in arial and used "arialbd" for the bold part.

It would appear that the bold part is actually a totally different character set. As far as I can see, if you change a font size, you have just "scaled up/down" a font characteristic, whereas if you have used bold, you've used a different font entirely (well that's to say a different version of the same thing to get the bold effect).

So when you copied over the "times" font, did you also copy over the "timesbd" or all versions of "times" ??? as this may have something to do with it not displaying any differently.

This is just something I've noticed. It may be of some help.

regards

John

I just copied the whole of my windows fonts folder over to my linux machine.
I think therefore I copied all the versions (bold, italic etc)

I'm now trying to get my hands on some mac fonts!

thanks for the help guys.

bigjohn, that was exactly my problem. I copied over all the times fonts, now bold and italic work.

For some reason the default linux fonts now work in OpenOffice 1.1 now as well. They aren't showing ? instead of ". I can't explain why that is. wish I knew incase it happens again.

No problem Pete,

I notice that while most things are straight forward, just occassionally one or two things either work differently/partially/not at all, for no obvious or apparent reason. font rendering happens to be one of them, with just the occassional "hiccup".

regards

John