Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 89761
Fonts corrupted and import/export feature broken in Gnumeric
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:53:20 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: I just installed Red Hat 9 on a new, blank drive, using the "Workstation" setup, with several additional packages selected. Before making any changes to the OS or installation which might void my (non-)warranty, I ran 'gnumeric' to access a budget spreadsheet I rely on for my basic survival. Gnumeric loaded the spreadsheet, but the display was all wrong. Everything not in bold or italic was printed with dotted boxes between each pair of letters. The left-hand row-number list was two or three times wider than it should have been. In fact, all the fonts seem to have problems -- some worse than others. In most, the letters are spaced much too far apart. In some, instead of extra space between the letters, there are dotted boxes. But far worse than the display glitches was the fact that most of the export formats are missing. In "File/Save As...", there should be roughly a dozen different formats, including some more-or-less standard formats like Excel 95. Instead, the only options I see are Gnumeric XML, Bonobo EFS, and text export (which doesn't save formulas). I could settle for migrating my spreadsheet from Gnumeric to OpenOffice Calc, but without a common file format, I can't even do that. I used Gnumeric under Debian before switching back to Red Hat, and though Debian screwed up many things, they got Gnumeric right. I had a smoothly functioning version of 1.0.10. Now I'm using 1.0.12 under Red Hat 9, and it seems to have taken a huge step backward. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gnumeric-1.0.12-3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Run gnumeric under Red Hat 9 2. Enter some text or numbers in a cell 3. Change the font 4. Try to Save As an Excel 95 file Actual Results: 3. The fonts display incorrectly. Characters are spaced very widely. One, New Century Schoolbook, displays correctly some of the time, but not always. 4. It can't be done. Expected Results: 3. Characters should be as close together in Gnumeric as they are in any other app. 4. File/Save As... should present a menu of much more than three format options. Additional info:
For the fonts, running as "LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1 gnumeric" may make a difference, worth a try. In the past several people have expressed the opinion that this is pretty unfixable otherwise, without breaking somthing else. Gnumeric upstream maintainers only want to address it in the context of gnumeric 2 (for pretty good reasons, probably). I have no idea what's up with the save as, will have to investigate.
Oops, I thought I replied to this weeks ago. (Maybe I did, in email.) Anyway, setting the locale as suggested fixes all the display problems. Of course, the save-as feature still appears to be broken. Thanks.
For Cambridge (=> Fedora Core Release 1) we're using gnumeric-1.2 which is based on GTK+-2.0, and a completely different text display engine; the text display problem should be fixed there. However, the export plugins don't seem to be working correctly in our 1.2... package. It may be because the package doesn't seem to be installing the GConf schemas. In the RHEL 3 betas, we are not currently including gnumeric.
redhat 9 is end of lifed now. In fedora core 2 we are using gnumeric 1.2.8 which is GTK2 and I don't see the whacked display issue anymore, and the plugins are now working.