Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 54450
OpenSymbols in text increases line spacing about 50%
Last modified: 2013-07-30 02:43:30 UTC
When I insert any special character from OpenSymbol font the line spacing is increased about 50%. Other special characters from other fonts are more or less good. It is undesirable for me because OpenSymbol font is very nice and contains many useful characters which I need to use. In WinXP this problem seems to be OK. I don't understand where the problem goes on . My OS is Mandriva Linux LE 2005. Many thanks.
confirming. While I expect a slight difference in line-heigt when different Fonts are use, the difference with opensymbol is huge.
MRU->US: on Windows it loooks acceptable to me (line spacing icreases just very little) like other Symbol fonts do. Please have a look on Linux (where this issue was reported on).
From what I can see, the described effect only takes place when selecting (latin/western) text and formatting it with OpenSymbol. Simply inserting special characters from "Insert/Special Character" with OpenSymbol does not change the line hight. Hence the problem is the fallback font for latin chars when OpenSymbol is selected.
us is wrong. This happens as well wenn the characters are inserted using Insert|Special character. I inserted the "=", the "â„š" and "â‹°" all should be available in Opensymbol (I used Insert|Special character with font set to OpenSymbol to insert them). See attached screenshot and sample document.
Created attachment 31645 [details] screenshot showing extreme linespacing when symbols from opensymbol are inserted
Created attachment 31646 [details] file as seen in the screenshot
HDU->IH: when changing OpenSymbol please keep make sure its line metrics stay in line with other popular fonts. hdu->cloph: Since there are many different versions of the OpenSymbol font floating around I wonder which font was actually picked up? The one directly from OOo2.0 (OpenSymbol 1.9) doesn't have the problem, but there are a lot of systems that have a modified version of OpenSymbol 1.7. This modified version has more glyphs and an about 25% higher ascent. An easy way to see if the original font was extended is by checking in the "Insert->SpecialCharacter" dialog, whether the font has any glyphs in the U+E100-E700 range. If it has them you are using the modified font.
IH->HDU: What can/should be fixed here if you say the latest version (1.9) is ok? I did not change anything in this font regarding to the metrics in the last versions. The amount of different glyphs in 1.7 and 1.9 should be the same. Why do people not use the latest version?
IH: sorry, I meant the amount of glyphs not of "different" glyphs.
IH: I have tested the "line spacing" of the OpenSymbol font on Windows and Mac OS X and did not found any noteworthy problems. The font designer itself can not directly control the line spacing of a font - the only thing he/she can affect this a little bit is by deciding how many space of the font rectangle should be used by the font outline itself. Most non-symbol fonts use 80% of this rectangle for regular letters/characters (the other space is used for accents and so on). Most of the symbol fonts use almost 100% of the font rectangle, because they do not have to take care of accents and such things. The size and line spacing of a font itself is then controlled by the software displaying this font.
I reopen this issue since "fixed" is the wrong resolution anyway.. I only have OpenSymbol version 1.9 installed on my system. md5sum: dd604fd024ebb8efc7872e2f5dd4b927 /opt/openoffice.org2.0/share/fonts/truetype/opens___.ttf The last available Symbol is U+E0DD (down-arrow) And the same version (same md5sum) from an installation of m141. Both versions exhibit the extended spacings. I'll attach my pspfontcache for reference. Does OOo do an internal mapping OpenSymbol → StarSymbol?
Created attachment 31722 [details] The pspfontcache. Only two identical OpenSymbol fonts version 1.9 present.
ih->cloph: as I already said in my last comment I have not the slightest idea how to fix this issue in the font design itself - so what do you think can be done here?
Hello everybody, I have found solution of this problem. You have to select characters contains OpenSymbol and change font name from OpenSymbol to another name (for example Times New Roman). After that the line spacing is now correct. I know that it is only bypass the basic problem. P.S.: Same problem with line spacing I have found on other linux distros (Knoppix, Mandriva, SuSE) of course with the newest font opens___.ttf
Back to ih. It is possible to define the baseline to baseline spacing of a font. I played around with fontforge and found that values of "-630 [x] Is offset" for "Win Ascent Offset" and "-200 [x] Is offset" for "Win Descent Offset" in the dialog Elements|Font Information → OS/2 → Metrics solves the problem perfectly for me. (i.e. no additional spacing, formulas still look the same) see http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/editexample5.html#baseline and http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/fontinfo.html#TTF-Metrics #### and regarding the status: > as I already said in my last comment I have not the slightest idea > how to fix this issue So if you didn't do anything to fix the issue, even don't know how you should tackle this, why do you think a resolution of "fixed" would fit? A proper resolution would be "wontfix" (cannot and/or don't want to fix) or "worksforme" (not reproducible on other problems or not such a big issue anyway). #### But since I think this is fixable (if you can give an explanation why other fonts don't exhibit the same problem, then I may change my mind), please have a second look.
Created attachment 31924 [details] the display when using a version of opensymbol that was modified as described.
IH->Cloph: sorry, fixed was indeed a wrong solution here - I set this to fixed at first because hdu mentioned some comments before that the problems did not appear in the latest rev of the font, but it looks like this is not really true. You said that it is possible to affect the linespacing by changing the ascend and descend values of the font. But if you change those values you also have to change the resolution of the overall fontbox to the value of ascend + descend? This is the reason why I always thought that the linespacing itself can not be affected by the font, but you have found out that changing some of those values creates better results in our case here - so this is very nice - I know that in the font area one can always learn new things every day. Please tell me in detail what you have changed in the font and then I can fix this for the OOo3.0 release. I think the QA will not let us do this for OOo2.0.2 or OOo2.0.3. Did you already do some tests on other platforms with your changed font? Thanks again to you ...By the way do you also have an idea how to fix issue 50834?
> You said that it is possible to affect the linespacing by changing the ascend > and descend values of the font. But if you change those values you also have > to change the resolution of the overall fontbox to the value of > ascend + descend? No, you misunderstood. I don't meant to modify the ascend and descend that define the em-units. That is a different setting that is left untouched. The setting I mean is not in the "General"-Tab, but in the "OS/2"-Tab of the "Font Information" dialog. I've read in a changelog entry that the OS/2 tab was introduced to group a bunch of settings that were spread in different tabs. So when you're using an older version of fontforge you might have to look around a bit for the settings. Please compare: http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/fontinfo.html#PS-General where you set Ascent and Descent and the number of EM-units (that is not what I mean). Here you'll see the old dialog without the new Tab "OS/2" - the settings I meant are probably in the "TTF-Values" tab in that version. with http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/fontinfo.html#TTF-Metrics where you can set the offsets I was talking about. > [...] Please tell me in detail what you have changed in the font and then I > can fix this for the OOo3.0 release. I think the QA will not let us do this > for OOo2.0.2 or OOo2.0.3. While I agree that OOo 2.0.2 might be a bit too early, I think 2.0.3 sounds reasonable. But let's see whether it doesn't break other platforms first :-) I didn't do anything else but * Increase version number (has nothing to with the issue) * Choose Elements|Font-Information Tab OS/2 Tab Metrics * In the box "Win Ascent Offset" enter "-630" (old value "0") * In the box "Wind Descent Offset" enter "-200" (old value "0") leave the other settings unchanged. * finally create the updated font with File|Generate Fonts > Did you already do some tests on other platforms with your changed font? Not me personally, but Simon Wilper checked on Windows (XP) and reported that the same settings work there as well. > Thanks again to you ... You're welcome :-) > By the way do you also have an idea how to fix issue 50834? Not yet. Did never experience that problem on windows-installations. (And this issue made me use fontforge & reading about font-stuff the very first time :-)
will be fixed in i59997 *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 59997 ***
IH: If I correctly understand the TrueType Spec everything in the OS2 Table is only used by Win and OS2 Systems. So this meens that WinAsc, WinDes, TypoAsc, TypoDes should not affect Linux systems. There problem here must be something else. See also #59997# for this.
HDU->IH: we try to format indentically on every platform, so of course our metrics on UNX should match the ones on WIN. For this reason the metrics from the OS2 table are used.
*** Issue 65855 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Since this issue will be kept, but is not fixed, reopen.
IH->Radek: Please, take over.
set target 3.x
Reset assignee on issues not touched by assignee in more than 1000 days.