No bold, italics after upgrade

[kai]

I just upgraded to OpenOffice 1.1.2 from 1.0.3 and now I don't get bold or italic characters to display correctly. They are just shown as vertical roman characters. The "B" and "I" markers are correctly shaded to indicate that the text is bold and italicised respectively, but no change in the text.

If I however explicitly change the font from, say, Times to TimesBold or TimesItalic with the "Font Name" menu, then I get the expected shapes, but the "B" and "I" markers don't realise that that text section is bold/italic.

I'm running on OS X 10.3.5, X11 1.0.

Any suggestions where I should start shooting troubles?

[sardisson]

This is a problem we're somewhat aware of. Partially at issue is the fact that OOo for X11 can't use native Mac fonts, so they have to be converted for use with OOo. The end result is that something in the conversion process (done by the third-party tool fondu) or the OOo code prevents the converted Mac fonts from being "merged" into a family where clicking the "B" makes the text bold and selects the bold weight font file.

For a full recap, see this thread: http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=2763#2763

Work-arounds: 1) Select the xxxBold font from the menu. 2) Select the "hardcoded" fonts (with the printer icon next to them), like Times. 3) Use OOo-provided Bitstream Vera fonts. 4) Get Windows fonts with the Font Autopilot (note the versions of the Microsoft fonts are quite old and don't contain many Unicode characters, if you need them). 5) Use NeoOffice/J 0.8.4 (or NeoOffice/J 1.1 Alpha 1 if you need 1.1.x-specific features or want the bleeding edge).

Edit: If selecting the "B" and "I" buttons worked correctly under 1.0.3, then that's something "we" can explore to figure out what happened, either in the OOo code or the newer version of fondu bundled with the 1.1.2 installer. Ed, Terry...?

Hope this helps,
Smokey

[OPENSTEP]

As smokey said, some of your regressions are due to the "improvements"...in versions prior to 1.1.x, 1.0.3 and earlier would not convert and find as many of the regular Mac fonts and result to displaying fonts like "Times New Roman" in bitmap fonts. Since it couldn't find their italics either, it displayed them in bitmap italic fonts.

But with 1.1.x it *can* find at least the regular "Times New Roman" after the conversion...so instead of bitmapped it displays it with the TrueType converted font. You can tell the difference onscreen as the TrueType fonts are antialiased while the bitmap ones are not. Unfortunately, it's not terribly clever about font styles...if it doesn't have an italic version of the TrueType font it goes ahead and uses what it thinks is the next closest matching font, the plain TrueType font, instead of the less-accurate italic bitmap font (less accurate from a font perspective, not a visual "style" perspective).

I'm not trying to explain the problem away, but it is know, and it will occur. It's a difficulty in mapping Mac font families of plain/semibold/bold/outline through from the dfonts into the ttfs. I haven't figured out any solution myself You may be able to trick OOo into falling back on the bitmap font to display itailcs onscreen with the various font mapping preferences. Only drawback is that WYSIWYG no longer applies as when using the closest TrueType equivalents available to the app.

ed

[okeefe]

Agh!! Me too-no italics, no bold. I may have to uninstall and revert to the older version, 1.0.3. This after weeks of trying to get a good version downloaded. If anyone knows any more I'll be greatful forever for a fix.