I run OOo (binary from openoffice.org). The XFree86 4.3.0 server shipped with Gentoo does not use the font configuration in /etc/X11/XF86Config anymore, but works with fontconfig. In /etc/fonts/local.conf, I added the line <dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts</dir> so all fonts in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts get recognized and antialiased correctly. However, OOo does not work with this setting. I have to add the fonts in XF86Config in order to have OOo recognize it correctly. As fontconfig is the now proposed configuration method, I consider this a bug. The OOo team said on http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=30274: "Your XServer is required to report the fontpath to OpenOffice.org by means of XGetFontPath(). If this is not working you should file a bug against Debian. OpenOffice.org 2.0 will use fontconfig. Please try any recent build or have a look at i20361." Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
can the OOo team shed some light on how OOo handles fonts at this point ?
There's a program called oopadmin (IIRC, no access to Linux right now) that you can use to add fonts to OOo.
Yep that's right, you will have to use oopadmin to add new fonts to OOo. Or you use openoffice-ximian which already works with fontconfig. So if anything I would consider that an upstream problem.
Also xfree actually supports two font rendering mechanisms. One is Xft, the other is so called core fonts. For the Xft method one needs fontconfig, for the corefonts the oldfashioned way with fonts.dir, fonts.scale and the directories in the configure file are needed. Many programs in some way still use core fonts so it makes sense to make fonts available through that configuration too.
