[26349] in Athena Bugs
Re: sun4 9.3.18: OpenOffice.org Font Inconsistency
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Wed Feb 9 18:13:28 2005
Message-Id: <200502092312.j19NCj3N002288@dit.mit.edu>
To: rpigneri@mit.edu
In-reply-to: "[26342] in Athena Bugs"
Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2005 18:12:45 -0500
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@mit.edu>
cc: bugs@mit.edu
Errors-To: bugs-bounces@mit.edu
Hi, you wrote to bugs:
>What were you trying to do?
> Write documents in OpenOffice.org Writer and Presentation.
>
>What's wrong:
> The Sun version has the Times New Roman font but not the
> Nimbus Roman font. The Linux version has Nimbus Roman but not
> Times New Roman.
>
>What should have happened:
> Both fonts should be on both systems with Nimbus Roman as the
> default.
>
>Please describe any relevant documentation references:
>
> There are two reasons for this change. First, having Times
> New Roman on both machines allows for easier document sharing
> with Microsoft Word since most Word documents are written with
> Times New Roman. Quite a few of my presentations and papers
> were mangled in OOo because of this issue. Second, this makes
> the use of OpenOffice.org more transparent across platforms.
I see the sense in what you are requesting but for a variety of
reasons it's not easy to comply- I think I can give you what you're
asking for though not exactly in the way you might prefer.
First, most of the fonts in Open Office are supplied through the operating
system, and these are significantly different on Sun and Linux machines.
They are stored in multiple locations and change over operating system
releases, so it's not practically feasible to keep them closely synchronized.
The only way to get fonts not present on one to the other is to copy over
font files from the other platform (or elsewhere), and that's not advisable for
a number of reasons.
Also, font changes and in particular changing the default font are
highly user-visible, and as a policy issue I don't change these during
a running semester in important lockers like ooffice.
Having said all that, I've provided the fonts you ask for (and others)
on each platform and instructions for installing them in your local
Open Office configuration directory, which I've added to the
ooffice_v1.1.4 locker- you'll be able to do this by by tomorrow after
the next AFS propagation (instructions will be in file
/mit/ooffice_v1.1.4/README.extra-fonts tomorrow, or you can read them
today by using the path
/afs/.athena/software/ooffice_v1.1.4/README.extra-fonts. The steps as
detailed in the instructions won't work until tomorrow).
As you most likely know, you can set your preferred default font yourself
by running "Tools" -> "Options" -> "Text Document" -> "Basic Fonts" and making
your preferred selection.
I hope this helps.
Alex Prengel
MIT Academic Computing
UNIX Third Party Software Support
