List of missing fonts in document? Or turn off substitution?

[heavyboots]

Hi all,

I hope this is not something obvious, but in Microsoft Word you can go to Preferences->Compatibility->Font Substitution and it will list the fonts used in the document and what it is substituting for them. Is there any way to achieve a similar result in NeoOffice?

I am attempting to prove once and for all that the text flow between Word & NeoOffice can be as-near-as identical. Which it is (well, if you enable "Use Printer Font Metrics" anyway), UNLESS font substitution is occurring, in which case the flow is still quite different. As such, the next best thing is to tell them it works perfectly if they have all the fonts open, but there seems to be no easy way for the user to tell what fonts they need active in the document to stop any substitution occurring.

Alternatively, if I could figure out how to halt font substitution, that would work too.

Thanks in advance!

[pluby]

I don't understand what you mean by stop font substitution. The only reason that font substitution occurs is because the document requests a font that does not exist on your machine. If you stopped font substitution, nothing would display.

As for workflow between NeoOffice and Word being nearly identical, I would have to say that I disagree with you. I understand that many pre-press production people are looking to unhook themselves from Word or In-Design, but neither NeoOffice nor its underlying OpenOffice.org code is designed to be a professional layout tool. Specifically, there are limitations in the OpenOffice.org code, like the ability to kern to fractions of a pixel, that will likely always make NeoOffice fall short of the production standards that the pre-press production industry expects.

Patrick

[heavyboots]

Hi Patrick,

Yes, "halt substitution" was a poor idea. Stayed home with the flu Friday, so I think it was already affecting my thinking when I wrote that post...

What I am looking for is a way to list what substitutions are going on in a given document. Microsoft Word can generate this list in the Preferences->Compatibility->Font Substitution. I am wondering if there is any way for NeoOffice to do so too that I have missed? As near as I can tell so far, NeoOffice only shows a global list of substitutions it will attempt rather than list the specific fonts for that document, such as Word displays. I am sort of hoping there is some subtle cue somewhere that I am missing to indicate which fonts are being substituted?

Our goal is mostly to be certain that when the client talks about page x in the document, that we are able to got to page x in the document at our end and be certain font substitution has not pushed the text to a different page. As long as we have all the same fonts open, my experiments indicate that we will, but if not then the documents can vary as much as 15 pages in length and cause a great deal of confusion.

Thanks again,
Eric.

[pluby]

Unfortunately, neither NeoOffice nor its underlying OpenOffice.org has a feature to show you what font was used as a fallback if the requested font is missing.

One thing to consider at that your problem is exactly the type of problem that PDF was designed to solve. Unlike NeoOffice or MS Office documents, PDF files have all of the fonts that it needs embedded into the file so that any PDF viewer application is guaranteed to render the document with the exactly same fonts. Additionally, PDF stores the X,Y coordinates that text and images are to be displayed at. Granted, PDF is not very editable but that is the trade-off: PDF gives you pixel-perfect rendering no matter who views it whereas NeoOffice and MS Office documents allow significant editing features but neither really provides both.

Patrick