Issue 87854 - Text in MS Office doc looks bad in OOo but good in MS Office
Summary: Text in MS Office doc looks bad in OOo but good in MS Office
Status: CONFIRMED
Alias: None
Product: General
Classification: Code
Component: ui (show other issues)
Version: OOo 2.4.0
Hardware: All All
: P3 Trivial (vote)
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: AOO issues mailing list
QA Contact:
URL:
Keywords: ms_interoperability
Depends on: 96581
Blocks:
  Show dependency tree
 
Reported: 2008-04-04 08:20 UTC by ml93712
Modified: 2017-05-20 11:35 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
Issue Type: ENHANCEMENT
Latest Confirmation in: ---
Developer Difficulty: ---


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Description ml93712 2008-04-04 08:20:48 UTC
How to reproduce:
- in Excel create a spreadsheet
- write text with "Arial 10pt" and set zoom factor to 60%
--> look at the text, the font is rendered good even when the text is not
readable because it is too small

- do the same in Calc or Writer
--> the font is rendered very bad

Workaround in OOo:
Choose a font and font size that is looking good even with a small zoom factor
or increase the zoom factor (e.g., from 60% to 75% can be helpful).

Root cause:
The symptoms seen indicate several root causes for the visual difference:

- For very small font sizes Excel uses the font "Small Fonts" instead of the
font requested by the document. Switching to a different font optimized for
legibility at very small sizes might make sense for Spreedsheets, so the Calc
team should have a look into this.

- The other issue is that Calc formats and displays the cells as calculated on a
high resolution reference device. Since fonts scale non-linearly and this
non-linearity is especially pronounced for small font sizes then adjusting the
display-text-layout to the reference-device-layout often makes the display-text
less readable but more accurate to a resulting printout. For optimized
legability at very small sizes adjusting the display-text to the
reference-layout should be disabled. The Calc team should have a look into this
too. A related problem with unneeded adjustment to a printer devices is already
known as issue #i65739#.

Additionally, in Calc at 60% the font is not antialiased. If a bigger zoom
factor is chosen then it's antialiased. Excel uses a different bitmap font
"Small Fonts" instead of "Arial" as a representation for such small font sizes.
Calc uses always the same font for all zoom factors. Unfortunately the font
"Arial" looks bad at this zoom factor.

Solution:
Best solution would be to find a default/system font on all platforms that is
looking good with small zoom factors and can be used as substitution for
displaying the text (of course not printing).
Comment 1 hdu@apache.org 2008-12-18 14:28:48 UTC
Since hinting is especially important for small font sizes please also see issue 96581#desc7 to understand 
why Calc should really avoid requesting its fonts stretched in this case.
Comment 2 hdu@apache.org 2008-12-18 14:36:55 UTC
Pointer to issue #q6668971# for the original problem and from where the issue submitter copied my my 
root cause analysis from.
Comment 3 Marcus 2017-05-20 11:35:21 UTC
Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".