From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031016 Description of problem: I am not sure how to diagnose this. I upgraded from RedHat 9 to Fedora Core 1 and fonts that previously worked no longer do. I have many documnents that use Times which now show up as a blob-of-dots where the document was previously. It looks as if OOo is rendering in a 1-pixel-per-character font. If I "select all" text and change the font (for instance, to one of the Bitstream fonts) the text comes out OK. At the moment only Times and Helvetica seem to have a problem which make me wonder if a specific package containing these fonts isn't quite right, or some cache is corrupted. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Open document created previously using RedHat 9 (Example: http://www.flora.ca/russell/drafts/manley200311.sxw with PDF at http://www.flora.ca/russell/drafts/manley200311.pdf ) 2. Do a "select all" and change the font (Example: Bitstream Vera Sans) and the text becomes readable. Alternative: 1. open Writer, choose Times or Helvetica, start typing and junk comes up. 2. Choose other font and type with expected results. Additional info:
Times and Helvetica aren't actually fonts that exist on your system, and so are forced to be substituted. 1.1.0-6 helps this. Can you upgrade to OOo 1.1.0-6 and see if the problem persists?
I'm updating my local copy of the Fedora archive now (to see if I can find the new OOo), but I'm confused. If Times and Helvetica don't exist on my system, why is OOo showing them in the font list? Is it possible that I have defective versions of these fonts somwhere on my system? If they didn't exist I would have known to set up an appropriate substitute, but these are fonts that show up as existing. Is there a font tool that will tell me what files are used to offer a given font? I'm still wondering if I have a dammaged cache file or similar somwhere. Maybe I don't have those fonts, just something is telling OOo that I do.
Turns out the reason that OOo was showing these fonts is that the generic printer PPD that OOo comes with has these fonts specified in them, because most printers have Times and Helvetica in ROM. So, logically, OOo shows the fonts that your printer can print with too. But they don't work so well onscreen when you don't actually have the real font file lying around.
I suspect I am having version mismatch issues. I thought I was running OpenOffice 1.1 from Fedora, but I am possibly running partly from OOo 1.1 that I installed before I upgraded to Fedora. My ~/.sversionrc [Versions] OpenOffice.org 1.0=file:///home/russell/OpenOffice.org1.0 OpenOffice.org 1.0.1=file:///home/russell/OpenOffice.org1.0.1 StarOffice 5.2=/home/russell/office52 OpenOffice.org 1.0.2=file:///home/russell/OpenOffice.org1.0.2 OpenOffice.org 1.1Beta=file:///home/russell/OpenOffice.org1.1Beta OpenOffice.org 1.1.0=file:///home/russell/.openoffice I didn't notice but running /usr/bin/oowriter seemed to want the local setup to be in ~/.openoffice/ so I did the setup there. I had previously had the setup in ~/OpenOffice.org1.1.0/ I now believe I am running the fedora version, and it is actually this version that I was running that I first noticed the problem. I was running OOo 1.1 from the OOo ISO and didn't see this problem: [russell@amadpur ~/.openoffice]>rpm -qf /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice openoffice.org-1.1.0-6
OK. I deleted the OOo 1.1 installed from the OOo CD, and deleted the ~/.openoffice/ directory. Rather than asking me to run setup (as it normally does) it just launched. This new launched OOo writer doesn't have those fonts listed any more, and if I load an old document created with OOo that uses Times it displays fine (although it does substitute with a different font than it did before). This bug may be switched to an enhancement request to pass back to OOo which is to try to detect when a font substitution was in error and alert the user rather than displaying 1-pixel fonts. Thanks for all your help Dan! Great to see as quick response from RedHat folks participating in Fedora as was the case with the older RedHat.
This looks kinda similar to bug ID #109628 I generally get fonts working in OOo except the Symbol font. Like the above poster, it comes out of printer as dots rather than characters. Screen looks kinda garbled too. Anyone having trouble with Acrobat Reader 5.08 installed after refresh to Fedora? Acrobat indicates it can't find symbol for me, OOo fonts appear garbled and patches missing from pdf's.....no printing possible unless it contains the standard embedded fonts like above. Thanks
There seem to be general font issues with OOo. Had an additional one related to spell checking. I had been cutting-and-pasting from webpages into a document only to find that while the text was displaying in a readable font that the font didn't exist and thus the spell checker didn't check the spelling. Spell checker would be checking one sentence (that was in a font that OOo knew) and not checking another (that was in a font OOo didn't know). Having 1-pixel fonts, fonts which 'look' english but don't spell check, and other such things makes OOo hard to use. While I figured this font-change out a less technical user would never have thought of ot.
Please try current OOo 1.1.0, and reopen if problem still occurs