[plug] Open Office

[Craig Ringer]

>
>
>So OO under Win 98 looks superb - under Linux it looks quite amateurish on
>the screen.
>
Interesting... I find it less than polished (that semi-win32 look and 
lack of colour configurability tho apparently
kde can force OOo to use KDE colour settings), especially when it comes 
to fonts.

You may find that the OpenOffice fonts are either not installed 
correctly or not loading right. Under debian "apt-get install 
ttf-openoffice" then make sure the /usr/share/fonts/truetype/openoffice 
dir is in your font path under X, it doesn't seem to get added 
automatically to /etc/X11/fs/config or /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, nor added 
in a startup script as far as I can tell. Stranger still, OpenOffice 
does not seem to install any of the fonts it refers to like Thorndale 
with the usual installer from openoffice.org. Ideas anybody? Apt-cache 
show on "ttf-openoffice" gives:
     This package contains some TrueType fonts taken from the OpenOffice 
project
     found at http://www.openoffice.org/.
Found at OO.o but not coming with the OO.o program installer, it 
seems.... more strangely still, fonts that OOo likes a lot like 
Thorndale don't seem to come with ttf-openoffice, the openoffice 
installer, or at least one major distro  (Debian).

Unfortunately I still have font problems - mainly some fonts are _ugly_. 
Bookman and New Century Schoolbook are awful, while others like Symbol, 
OpenSymbol, Courier, Charter and Palatino are nice. It seems to ignore 
the hinting on some fonts. My pet hate is that it doesn't have a proper 
(GIMP-style) font selector so you can't for example pick adobe-bookman 
from urw-bookman. Consequently I can't even find out _which_ Bookman, 
etc its using. It also only wants to see a tiny selection of the fonts I 
have installed.

Other than somewhat clunky GUI toolkit and _really_ bad font support (?) 
I find it quite wonderful ; esp if you don't want to buy MS Access just 
to let one of the employees at work do a Mail Merge from MS word. I 
thought modularization was intended to _add_ customer flexibility, not 
let you force the customer to buy all the modules at inflated prices...

Some suggestions from the OO.o followers on the list re fonts would be 
really handy for me and no doubt many others on the list.