Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 103417
Problem in Special-Character dialog when font styles have inconsistent coverage
Last modified: 2009-09-15 08:44:48 UTC
We use DejaVu as our company font. I tried to create custom bullet lists that use the Bullets in DejaVu. A lot of the glyphs in DejaVu Sans (or DejaVu Sans mono) are not available in the special character selection box. For example the characters 26AB, 26AA, 26AC are absent (and lots more if I compare the installed TTF files as seen with fontforge and what is displayed by OO on Linux). This seems to be Linux specific, as it works on Windows where the characters are available. I've tried it with the Ubuntu 9.04 shipped DejaVu font definitions (2.28) and the latest from the DejVue website (2.29). Don't know enough about the font management internals, but I see the missing stuff show up as "Miscellaneous Dingbats" on Windows, whereas on Linux I only see Dingbats in the subset selection. Seems to point to OO selectively ignoring some subsections.
MRU->HDU: on Unix, e.g. in the DejaVu fonts, on Windows there are much more characters available via "Insert.special character" than under Linux and Solaris. Cannot imagine, that this is designed; the fonts have in Windows and Unix equal file sizes...
> the fonts have in Windows and Unix equal file sizes... Exactly! The characters are in the font (as I wrote above, I can see them in fontforge, and I am using the same font files on Linux and windows). But OO on Linux does not allow me to access them via the special character Menu vs. OO on Windows which does. A colleague of mine had an older OO 3.01 installed on Linux, there he could see them as well on Linux.
I cannot confirm that this ever worked in older OOo builds on Linux. I checked with 3.0.x and 2.4.1 and both showed the current incorrect behavior.
The difference between Windows and a typical Linux is that the latter usually provide a lot more styles for DejaVu. And Writer selects a random style, e.g. when DejaVuSans-Extralight is available it likes to select "DejaVu Sans", weight=WEIGHT_LIGHT, width=WIDTH_SEMI_CONDENSED. And this style of "DejaVu Sans" does not contain all the glyphs of their mainstream counterparts. So the best way to really fix it is for Writer+EditEngine+etc. to fix its handling of font styles. A less expensive solution would be to request the "Regular" style. A similar but not-as-good solution could be that the InsertSpecial dialog should ignore the styles Writer and the other apps request and just use "Regular". I can see some problem reports that a workaround like this would result in: "Why are you ignoring the font style! We explicitely requested it! ..." The quickest workaround would be to deinstall the dejavu-experimental package on Linux. And there is of course the UI-question what is the best way to handle the situation when the faces of the same font family have a wildly different selection of unicode coverage. If anyone has a good idea how to solve this scenario please submit this to the good UX-experts (assign an "enhancement" issue to "requirements").
> The quickest workaround would be to deinstall the dejavu-experimental package on Linux. Not installed here ;-) $ dpkg -l|egrep -i deja ii ttf-dejavu 2.28-1 Metapackage to pull in ttf-dejavu-core and ttf-dejavu-extra ii ttf-dejavu-core 2.28-1 Vera font family derivate with additional characters ii ttf-dejavu-extra 2.28-1 Vera font family derivate with additional characters Or are you referring to the extra parts as experimental? Our workaround was to define the stuff we need on Windows, once it is defined, OO on Linux will just use it. ;-)
Probably it is "ttf-dejavu-extra" then that triggers the problem. Package names are free-style after all. If it works for documents imported from other platforms then this is because Writer handles font styles in the document a little better than in its Insert->Special dialog. Not good enough though (i79878).
On a second thought the idea of ignoring the requested style and using the default style looks most promising for a fast and reasonable solution. If anyone has problems with this speak up now or hold your peace forever.
Done in CWS vcl103.
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*** Issue 102216 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Got into DEV300_m54. Closing.