Hi, following a lead given by someone in the Gentoo Forums, it transpires that by setting: export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libfreetype.so before running any OpenOffice component, the font rendering is improved beyond belief, in line with the rendering one would expect from a lot of other modern Xft based software running in X. This is particularly evident for TrueType fonts (once used the ooadmin program to link them in, that is). By also configuring anti-aliasing to only be applied at fonts above 15pt (this can be done in the OpenOffice preferences dialog), and by substiting a font like "Arial" for "Andale Sans UI" (also in OO preferences) the appearance of the program becomes rather magnificent. OO pays no attention to directives in .fonts.conf, at least not for anti-aliasing but the dialog does the trick. Not sure if the tweak would be stable for everyone. It was problematic for me on my system until I re-installed Gentoo recently. Before I was running lots of ~x86 builds and the system had been installed many months ago. But since re-installing (which co-incided with the semi-freeze of the Portage tree) and sticking to stable builds, the technique works flawlessly for me. This could be a really nice tweak to add to the OO component startup scripts :-) And changing the other two aspects mentioned could make for a much more enjoyable "out-of-box" experience too.
seth: this is a dup of some bug ... i cant remember what bug ... but the last one you had no idea wtf the guy was talking about ... something about freetype and version hinting ... basically his english was quite broken
This definitly makes fonts in OpenOffice.org look *much* better. I found that the best place to put this so that it is used all the time is in the /usr/bin/ooffice script at line 179, just add "export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libfreetype.so" and you're done.
fixed in cvs
bleh fixed
This appears to actually break the fonts in openoffice-bin-1.0.2. See this thread in the forums: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=270314
this isn't what breaks the binary, its a broken fontpath that breaks it...read the ewarns after upgrading x and installing openoffice
