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rwessel
Blue Pill
Joined: Oct 12, 2011
Posts: 4
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 Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2011 2:54 am Post subject: Style compatibility with OpenOffice/LibreOffice |
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I've been quite impressed by the Lion integration added to NeoOffice, but unfortunately I can't keep using it without compatibility with OpenOffice/LibreOffice. We work with both (and exchange documents with colleagues who use either one), and both applications render documents identically. But NeoOffice doesn't, and the difference is striking. Refer to the attached example - LibreOffice above and NeoOffice below. The differences are as bad when exported as PDF too.
We've never had a similar issue moving documents between OpenOffice and LibreOffice. We'd love to use and support NeoOffice, but it's a non-starter without compatibility. Is NeoOffice intended to move toward compatibility in the future? |
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djpimley
The Anomaly
(earlier version)
Joined: Jun 11, 2006
Posts: 481
Location: Great Britain
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2011 4:33 am Post subject: |
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| I imagine it would be very helpful for Patrick if you could attach a sample document. |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2011 5:19 am Post subject: |
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I do not understand what you are requesting. From your screen snapshot, it looks like you have set the font to a bold font and both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice are failing to properly render using a bold font. If that is the case, then that sounds like a bug in OpenOffice.org's Mac font handling (both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice have use the same Mac font handling code that uses obsolete Apple text rendering functions).
Another possibility is that the difference you see is due to NeoOffice's use of older OpenOffice.org code. You did not say which versions of OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice that you use, but I suspect that they are newer than the OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 code that NeoOffice's latest version uses.
If you attach a sample document that we can use to reproduce what you see, then we can tell which of the above is the case.
Instructions for attaching a sample document to your post are in this forum post.
Patrick |
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rwessel
Blue Pill
Joined: Oct 12, 2011
Posts: 4
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2011 5:20 am Post subject: |
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| djpimley wrote: | | I imagine it would be very helpful for Patrick if you could attach a sample document. |
OK, I've attached a very small document. I'm not sure why it's necessary though - I've can't seem to get style compatibility to work at all. I assumed this was a common problem. Do you think it's a bug? |
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rwessel
Blue Pill
Joined: Oct 12, 2011
Posts: 4
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2011 5:37 am Post subject: |
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| pluby wrote: | | I do not understand what you are requesting. |
Compatibility between OpenOffice/LibreOffice and NeoOffice, i.e. so if I receive a document from one of those systems it will look the same in NeoOffice.
| pluby wrote: | | From your screen snapshot, it looks like you have set the font to a bold font and both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice are failing to properly render using a bold font. |
Yes, it's bold text. But OpenOffice and LibreOffice are rendering it correctly. Refer to the attached image - the upper version is set to bold and the lower version is plain. Note that they look identical when exported as PDF, and I'm sure Preview is rendering it correctly. But the appearance and PDF output from NeoOffice is completely different.
| pluby wrote: | | If you attach a sample document that we can use to reproduce what you see, then we can tell which of the above is the case. |
Attached above. I look forward to your analysis. I would quite like to be able to use NeoOffice, but not if our documents won't open correctly. |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2011 5:44 am Post subject: |
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Thank you for the sample document. Your sample document indicates that what you are seeing is a bug in both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. You have set the paragraph style's font to Optima and Bold. While NeoOffice's native Mac font rendering code is able to properly find the Optima font's bold typeface, both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice fail to find the Optima font's bold typeface and are rendering using the Optima font's regular typeface.
Since this is an OpenOffice.org bug, we will not purposely introduce this bug in NeoOffice (fixing bugs like this is one of the reasons that NeoOffice exists) but I can give you a simple workaround: edit each of the paragraph styles and change their font's typeface to "Regular".
Patrick |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2011 6:00 am Post subject: |
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Interestingly, I did find a bug in NeoOffice when I used the workaround in my last post: when the paragraph style is set to Optima with the Regular typeface, NeoOffice cannot make a match and uses the Arial font as a fallback font.
Edit pluby: fixing this NeoOffice bug may actually make NeoOffice behave the same way as OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice so before you use my workaround, I would recommend waiting for a fix for this bug.
I will move this topic to the NeoOffice Support forum for further handling of the NeoOffice bug as bug handling is a support activity. When I have a fix, I will post a test patch with the fix that everyone can try.
Patrick
Last edited by pluby on Wed Oct 12, 2011 6:06 am; edited 1 time in total |
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rwessel
Blue Pill
Joined: Oct 12, 2011
Posts: 4
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2011 6:04 am Post subject: |
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| pluby wrote: | | Your sample document indicates that what you are seeing is a bug in both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. You have set the paragraph style's font to Optima and Bold. While NeoOffice's native Mac font rendering code is able to properly find the Optima font's bold typeface, both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice fail to find the Optima font's bold typeface and are rendering using the Optima font's regular typeface. |
If that's true, then all my software is wrong except for NeoOffice. Refer to my example above, which shows the original bold text and the plain version beneath as produced by LibreOffice.
I have attached another example showing the same bold and plain text in Pages, TextEdit, LibreOffice, and NeoOffice. The NeoOffice text is the glaringly different version at the bottom. This is clearly a problem with NeoOffice. |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2011 6:07 am Post subject: |
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You posted while I was posting so please read my last post.
I have moved this topic to the NeoOffice Support forum since that is where we handle NeoOffice bugs. I will post a test patch when I have a fix for the bug.
Patrick |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2011 6:38 am Post subject: |
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FYI. I created bug 3668 to track this issue. The two specific bugs that I have found in NeoOffice are:
1. When a document has been saved with the font name "Optima" and the typeface is not bold or italic, NeoOffice does not render using the "Optima Regular" font.
2. When a document has been saved with the font name "Optima" and the typeface is set to bold, NeoOffice renders using the "Optima ExtraBlack" font.
Both of the above bugs exist in all versions of NeoOffice 2.x and 3.x so these bugs have been in NeoOffice for many years. But since they were not reported by any other donors (even when we were able to allow support posts for much donations), I suspect that this bug is specific only to the Optima font family and not other font families.
I will post when I have more news to report.
Patrick |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2011 9:58 am Post subject: |
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I have more news: the problem is that NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code is selecting the Arial or Optima ExtraBlack font. From what I can see, the OpenOffice.org treats "Arial" as a better match the "Optima Regular" when a document wants the plain "Optima" font and it treats "Optima ExtraBlack" as a better match than "Optima Bold" for the bold "Optima" font.
I will continue to see if I can tweak the OpenOffice.org code to match Mac OS X's unique font names. Essentially, this is the source of the problem: the OpenOffice.org assumes that all fonts only have a single, strict naming convention:
| Code: | Family Name
Family Name Bold
Family Name Italic
Family Name Bold Italic |
The above assumption is incorrect which is why in OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice you cannot access half of the fonts that Mac OS X bundles.
NeoOffice shows all Mac OS X fonts so in NeoOffice you see fonts like "Optima ExtraBlack". Additionally, in NeoOffice you see the real font names like "Optima Regular" instead of the fake "Optima" font name that you see in OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice.
While we will not hide Mac OS X's font differences from Windows and Linux like OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice do, we will try to improve the OpenOffice.org font name matching code to handle the fake font names that OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice documents have in them.
Patrick |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 10:49 am Post subject: |
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FYI. I think that I have fixed this OpenOffice.org font name matching bug and I have included the fix for this bug in the following test patch.
While I am pretty confident that the bug that rwessel found is fixed for the Optima font family, my worry is that the fix might break font matching when a plain font is selected and the bold or italic buttons are pressed. Can any donors verify that this test patch does not cause any changes to the fonts that are actually rendered?:
Intel:
http://joe.neooffice.org/test/NeoOffice-3.2.1-Patch-1-Test-1-Intel.dmg
Patrick |
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