Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 3730
Cannot tell which foundry when selecting a font
Last modified: 2013-08-07 14:38:26 UTC
I have a bunch of fonts with the same name from different foundaries. For example, I have Courier from abiword, adobe, and bitstream and Times New Roman from abiword and monotype. When picking a font in Writer, all I see is one instance the font name (only one Courier and Times New Roman) and not the foundry so I have no way of telling which font I am actually picking. My suggestion would be to list the foundry along with the name whenever there is more than one Occurrence of a font name. Tested with 641D on Redhat Linux 7.2 with XFree86 4.1.0 and xfs
To me, this looks like an enhancment and not like a defect. Christoph: Please explain the pros and cons in order to ease a decision by FT/CJ before reassigning to CJ. Reassigned to Christoph.
Seems to be use case issue. If you can decide on the foundry of the font, your font list will grow much longer, which is cumbersome for people that only want to use Times, regardless which foundry. On the other hand this give more choice into the hand of people who really know what they do. Does it really make sense to install more than one instance of a Times font ? Please ask a font expert about it. By distinguishing between different foundries we will loose the font substitution to some extend. If you now have a Monotype-Times with latin-1 glyph repertoir and a Adobe-Times with cyrillic glyph repertoir, then nowadays these fonts are treated as one Times font with combined Cyrillic and Latin-1 glyph repertoir. This feature would break and had to be reimplemented differently. If we keep the foundry, we may need incompatible changes for the document format to store the foundry, please double check with MIB.
If you do not want to include the foundary in the font names, how about a preference where I can set my preferred foundary? Or even a list of foundaries in some order of desirablility? I have multiple fonts because RedHat installed a bunch, AbiWord installed some more, and I installed the Microsoft Monotype fonts. Now I suppose I could delete some of the other fonts, but who knows what I would break. I think it is expecting far too much from end users to try to configure fonts in XFree86 just to get OO to work right. I mean, every time I try to configure fonts, I manage to screw it up some how. And why do I care about the foundary in the first place? Because most fonts look terrible. The Monotype fonts are the only ones I find acceptable. Even Thorndale looks pretty bad.
It would help if OOo would give priority to the fonts that are in the user directory (in other words, the fonts that the user added explicitly using spadmin). This would make it possible to install custom versions of standard fonts, and have them supercede the other fonts on the system.
Like Christof wrote we will get some incompatibilites with older documents, because currently the foundary is not written into the document. But in general I see this more like an Enhancement, Bettina could please add this to your list. Thanks.
Hello Michael, could you please give your evaluation to this issue? Thank you.
I'm not a font expert, but I agree with Christof that loosing some parts of teh font substitution is not advantageous. Christof is also right when he says that the file formats needs to be enhanced. That's of course possible, if there are strong reasons to support the foundary names.
We need to properly distinguish between defects and enhancements. Also, looking at the scope and potential impact on the file format, I'd like to propose targeting this task to OO.o 2.0.
Considered for 'Office Later'.
As a workaround I manually change the fonts.dir in the user directory to include the full (desired) names of the fonts. Yes, this makes the fonts list longer but now I can select each font individually. I also made a patch to fontmanager to not consider any X fonts. This gets rid of the 'rubbish' fonts and also makes the fonts list shorter again. (Would you consider adding this patch? It is rather trivial, and it's functionality is controlled by setting an environment variable.)
I've been thinking about this for a while now, trying several alternative workarounds and even some custom modifications to OOo. This is my personal opinion, although I've read several messages and reactions that indicate the same line of ideas. For the average work, the current approach is okay, and it would indeed be nice to port it to other platforms (Windows) as well (see bug 28610). I cannot foresee how that will affect the document exchange between OOo on Windows and MS Word, since they will then use different views on font names, with all probable problems. For the more professional work, any approach has its defiencies. There are no real font name and attribute standards, and many fonts, including many professional fonts, use their own ideas. So the current approach of trying to 'guess' the name, family and properties of a font will allways have its limitations. The solution I see is to have a more advanced font selection tool, that allows the user to specify the exact properties manually, guided by the current heuristics. This could be a function added to spadmin. When adding a new font, the user would have the option to manually adjust the outcome of the heuristics. Joe Average will probably never need this, but for more professional work it is absolutely necessary. It will also make it possible to correctly deal with font properties like condensed/expanded, smallcaps, OSF, and so on. What do you think?
To grep the issues easier via "requirements" I put the issues currently lying on my owner to the owner "requirements".