Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 87854
Text in MS Office doc looks bad in OOo but good in MS Office
Last modified: 2017-05-20 11:35:21 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).
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.
Pointer to issue #q6668971# for the original problem and from where the issue submitter copied my my root cause analysis from.
Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".