Maybe this bug should be reported upstream, but I'm don't know which patches Gentoo apply and I don't have good experiences with Ximian support. Openoffice Ximian 1.3.7 and 1.3.8 (I didn't check previous releases) don't honour font settings in /etc/fonts/local.conf (from media-libs/fontconfig) and xrdb. At the moment I compile freetype with the patented bytecode interpreter, but I enable patent-free autohinting with option "Xft.autohint: 1" in ~/.Xresources, and disable it just for some fonts with instructions in /etc/fonts/local.conf for example: <match target="font"> <test name="family"> <string>Verdana</string> </test> <edit name="autohint" mode="assign"> <bool>false</bool> </edit> </match> This way, in GTK+ and QT-based applications (and with firefox too) Verdana is rendered with the bytecode interpreter, while every other fonts is rendered with the freetype auto-hinter. On the contrary OpenOffice Ximian renders all fonts with the bytecode interpreter.
You should really file this upstream, there is nothing we can do here
