Poor quality fonts in OpenOffice menus
 

Hi, I've been searching for a solution for this problem for a few days with no success.

I'm running -current (13.37) 32 bit and have installed OpenOffice 3.2.1. The problem is the menu fonts in OpenOffice which look very thin and are not smooth. All other application fonts look very good. When I had this same version of OpenOffice installed on Slackware 12.2 I did not see this problem.

In OpenOffice I have ticked the option to use system font for user interface but this doesn't seem to have any effect. I've also ticked the screen font anti aliasing option because the fonts look worse when this is not ticked. My KDE system font is DejaVu Sans, the same as it was on Slackware 12.2.

My OpenOffice package was built using a script written by Robby Workman which I think I got from his web site a long time ago. It takes the rpms and creates a Slackware package. EDIT: the script came from slackbuilds.org.

Has anyone got any ideas? Thanks.

Maybe you're used to auto hinted fonts. I think open office forces bytecode interpreter.

Could be that, but I have no idea what that means or what I can do about it. Would you mind explaining a bit more? Is this something which will have changed between 12.2 (KDE3) and 13.37 (KDE4)? Thanks.

Perhaps now is the time to switch to LibreOffice.
Robby already indicated that he will no longer release updates to his openoffice.SlackBuild.

Eric

Thanks for the heads-up about that, Eric! I've moved over to LibreOffice; I am impressed. Thanks for an excellent package, man! :)

The bytecode interpreter that freetype uses is a hinting algorithm that was patented by Apple, the patent expired and freetype now uses it by default. The change happened during this -current cycle so it wouldn't have been previously enabled by default in previous Slackware releases. AFAIK the open office binary is built to use the bytecode interpreter whether you have system wide autohinting enabled or not. Many people prefer the look of autohinted fonts over BCI hinting, I'm not sure, but I think a general rule of thumb is MS, Apple, Adobe fonts look better with BCI and free fonts look better with autohinting or something like that.

I'm not even sure this is your problem, it was more just a passing thought. You can recompile freetype with BCI disabled if you want to check if it makes a difference.

Thank you, I think you are right. I recompiled freetype without BCI and the menu fonts were much better in OpenOffice 3.2.1.

I have now found another solution which allows me to use the standard Slackware 13.37 freetype package. I modified Robby's script slightly to work with OpenOffice 3.3.0 and this version doesn't have the fonts problem. There is an entry in the changelog for 3.3.0 which says "Support fontconfig hinting/embedding/antialiasing settings on X11 ports" so that may be the reason for 3.3.0 looking better.

Yes indeed. That is one of the next things on my list. I think that is the way forward.