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mds
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Joined: Sep 25, 2009
Posts: 43
Location: Switzerland
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 Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:55 am Post subject: Better Overview for Font Selection? |
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For some fonts, NeoOffice lists not only the font name but all available font variants, 50+ for example for Helvetica:
Is it possible to get a better overview for the font selection?
TextEdit's font selection e.g. provides a much better overview for the samt font:
Martin |
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pluby
The Architect
Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:06 am Post subject: Re: Better Overview for Font Selection? |
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| mds wrote: | For some fonts, NeoOffice lists not only the font name but all available font variants, 50+ for example for Helvetica:
Is it possible to get a better overview for the font selection? |
Unfortunately, NeoOffice does not support the special font variants that some fonts support. NeoOffice can only support the default variant for each font.
The bad news is that even if we wanted to add support for the special font variants, it is not feasible to implement because NeoOffice uses Apple's Java to draw all text and there is no way to tell Apple's Java to use a special font variant.
Patrick |
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pluby
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Joined: Jun 16, 2003
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:45 am Post subject: |
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I should clarify my last post. Where and I said "font variants", I mean "font features". Font features are optional font layouts that a font can support. In contrast, a font variant is really different fonts of the same family like regular, bold, italic, and bold italic.
NeoOffice support font variants but not any special font features.
Patrick |
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pluby
The Architect
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:57 am Post subject: |
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OK. I need to take a step back. I misread mds' question as "NeoOffice lists not only the font name but not all available font variants" (note the "not" that my mind incorrectly inserted). Then I saw the Kursive variants in the TextEdit screen snapshot and assumed he was talking about Helvetica's special cursive font feature.
So that I understand the question, the reason that NeoOffice displays a list of actual fonts and does not group them into hierarchical menus by font family name is because NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code has no ability to handle fonts in any way other than a simple list.
Changing the OpenOffice.org code to display fonts in a hierarchical structure would require a lot of changes to NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code.
Unfortunately, our very limited donations only provides enough funding for one fulltime developer which limits the current scope of the NeoOffice project to keeping a stable version of OpenOffice.org running on Mac OS X. Because of these limits, making signficant feature changes to the OpenOffice.org code is outside that scope.
Patrick |
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mds
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Joined: Sep 25, 2009
Posts: 43
Location: Switzerland
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 12:06 pm Post subject: |
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| pluby wrote: | So that I understand the question, the reason that NeoOffice displays a list of actual fonts and does not group them into hierarchical menus by font family name is because NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code has no ability to handle fonts in any way other than a simple list.
Changing the OpenOffice.org code to display fonts in a hierarchical structure would require a lot of changes to NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code. |
Thanks a lot for investing all that time for my question!
Are you sure that there's an issue with the corresponding OpenOffice.org code?
In the current version of OOo, the fonts are displayed in a nicely grouped way:
Martin |
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pluby
The Architect
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 12:11 pm Post subject: |
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| mds wrote: | | Are you sure that there's an issue with the corresponding OpenOffice.org code? |
Yes. Did you not notice that OpenOffice.org is "cleaner" because it is missing fonts? OpenOffice.org tries to implement your requested feature by only displaying the "regular" version of each font in the list and dropping all other font variants for each font from the list.
This hack means that you can only access the bold, italic, and bold italic font variants by pressing the corresponding toolbar buttons and, even worse, there is no way to access any other variants like condensed, wide, narrow, etc.
Patrick |
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mds
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Posts: 43
Location: Switzerland
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 12:14 pm Post subject: |
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| pluby wrote: | Yes. Did you not notice that OpenOffice.org is "cleaner" because it is missing fonts? OpenOffice.org tries to implement your requested feature by only displaying the "regular" version of each font in the list and dropping all other font variants for each font from the list.
This hack means that you can only access the bold, italic, and bold italic font variants by pressing the corresponding toolbar buttons and, even worse, there is no way to access any other variants like condensed, wide, narrow, etc. |
I didn't notice this limitation, thank you!
Martin |
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ovvldc
Captain Naiobi
Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2352
Location: Zürich, CH
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| Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2009 12:59 am Post subject: |
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At the same time I still have Bold and Italic buttons on my toolbar and in the style definition dialogues.
Could you clarify what they do exactly? Or is it somewhere in the Wiki and am I just a bit daft?
Thanks,
Oscar
_________________
"What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi |
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pluby
The Architect
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| Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2009 9:33 am Post subject: |
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| ovvldc wrote: | At the same time I still have Bold and Italic buttons on my toolbar and in the style definition dialogues.
Could you clarify what they do exactly? Or is it somewhere in the Wiki and am I just a bit daft? |
In NeoOffice, pressing the Bold or Italic toolbar buttons will cause NeoOffice to replace the current font with its bold and/or italic variant if one exists. If such a variant does not exist (not all Mac OS X fonts have bold or italic variants), pressing these buttons will have no effect.
For example, if the selected text's current font is Times New Roman and you press both the Bold and Italic buttons, the current font will be changed to Times New Roman Bold Italic. Then, unpressing both buttons will revert the current font back to Times New Roman.
Now if the selected text's current font is American Typewriter (which has no italic variant), pressing both buttons will change the current font to American Typewriter Bold. The same happens for American Typewriter Condensed: that font has no italic variant so pressing both buttons will change the curreent font to American Typewriter Condensed Bold.
On a side note, I found another example of the bug caused by the hack that OpenOffice.org uses to make their font list look tidier: American Typewriter Condensed and its variants are dropped from the font list. Instead they only list American Typewriter.
Patrick |
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