newbie questions (fonts, etc.)

higg0008 · Blue Pill Joined: Apr 23, 2004 Posts: 4

I installed OOo 1.0.3 (10.2.6, X11 beta 3) on my 900 MHz iBook some time ago, and I'm finally getting around to learning it. Sorry for the possible redundancy on some of this, but I couldn't find an exact match for my problem on the list.

My problem is that a number of fonts show up in the pull-down menu as squares and weird symbols, etc. I know there's something I'm missing here. Other than the font problem, OOo seems to work just fine.

OPENSTEP · Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2004 10:47 pm Post subject:

Generally, the fonts that appear as squares and weird symbols are either fonts with encodings that aren't understood by OOo (some of the webdings fonts, etc.) or are the foreign language fonts that ship with OS X. The font conversion process performed on installation of 103GM attempts to convert every font on the system, even Asian, Arabic, and other Mac fonts that aren't really usable by OOo 103GM. Those fonts are probably the ones that you're seeing as fubared in the font pulldown.

ed

higg0008 · Blue Pill Joined: Apr 23, 2004 Posts: 4

Thanks much for your reply!

So do I just need to go into ~/Applications/OpenOffice.org1.0.3/share/fonts and experiment with pulling out fonts that I think are causing trouble? Can I just Trash them? And does the font list in OOo appear in the same order as it does in, say, AppleWorks 6? (It looks like it does). Because then I think it would be pretty easy to figure out the offenders.

Zapf Dingbats appears fubared, although the name is visible in the menu. Most of the others are just weird symbols (no name visible). And yep, the foreign language fonts are messed up too--I normally leave them out of the OS X install in the first place, but my refurb iBook came from Apple with a fully loaded 10.2.

Is there any way that unreadable fonts can be converted? I understand that OOo can only read TrueType, and I've also read about fondu being able to do some kinds of font conversion, but I'm pretty confused about how to do it. I'm really new to the whole Unix thing, though I have learned how to do some basic tasks in Terminal.

OPENSTEP · Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2004 8:56 pm Post subject:

(sorry, back from three hours of trying to remove damage done by hackers)

You're spot on in that removing problems fonts from the /Applications/OpenOffice.org1.0.3/share/fonts directory should solve your problem. Important to note, though, is that if you add or remove a font file you should also remove the file named "pspfontcache" (I believe it's in /Applications/OpenOffice.org1.0.3/share/psprint). You need to remove that font cache file in order to force OOo to regenerate the font list and get rid of the recently removed fonts (or add new fonts).

Right now there's no way of adding in fonts to OpenOffice.org that "don't work". The problem is that OOo doesn't understand the more esoteric Mac font encodings beyond MacRoman. NeoOffice/J may be able to understand the newer font encodings since it isn't trying to parse the TrueType fonts directly and is using the JVM instead.

ed