Duplicate Nimbus Sans L font files causes display conflict in LibreOffice

[Gunter Ohrner]

Regression in Saucy Salamander 13.10, worked fine in 13.04 and previous releases. Affects LibreOffice Writer. The Nimbus Sans L font rendering and cursor positioning in texts is messed up, the letters look slightly distorted, letter spacing is incorrect with even partially overlapping letters and the cursor positioning in a line of text does not always match the actual editing position. Wrong font rendering also effects PDF files generated with LibreOffice writer in Saucy. Nimbus Sans L font rendering looks fine in kCharSelect. PDFs generated before the update also are not affected and are rendered fine by Okular.

WORKAROUND: Removing texlive-fonts-recommended fixes the problem.

---
ApportVersion: 2.12.5-0ubuntu2.1
Architecture: amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
MarkForUpload: True
Package: libreoffice 1:4.1.3-0ubuntu1
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.11.0-14.21-generic 3.11.7
Tags: saucy
Uname: Linux 3.11.0-14-generic x86_64
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to saucy on 2013-12-17 (0 days ago)
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom davfs2 dialout disk lp lpadmin plugdev sambashare www-data

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Gunter Ohrner, thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please execute the following command, as it will automatically gather debugging information, in a terminal:
apport-collect 1261936
When reporting bugs in the future please use apport by using 'ubuntu-bug' and the name of the package affected. You can learn more about this functionality at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

[Gunter Ohrner (gohrner)]

apport information

[Gunter Ohrner (gohrner)]

apport information

[Gunter Ohrner (gohrner)]

HTH, although there seems to be little detail about packages related to the actual problem in the data submitted by apport.

Do you need any additional information?

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Funter Ohrner, thank you for performing the requested apport-collect. Could you please attach an example document that demonstrates this problem, along with a screenshot of the problem?

[Gunter Ohrner (gohrner)]

Trying to produce the requested documents and screenshots I noticed something strange:

LibreOffice provides a varying set of font weights for Nimbus Sans L in its chooser dialog, depending on whether I create a new document or open a previously created one (which did work fine before the upgrade).

I noticed the following: According to fc-list, there were three packages installed which provided the Nimbus Fonts with partially conflicting weights:

# fc-list | egrep 'Nimbus Sans L'
/usr/share/fonts/type1/texlive-fonts-recommended/uhvb8a.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold
/usr/share/fonts/type1/texlive-fonts-recommended/uhvro8a.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular Italic
/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/n019003l.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/n019004l.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold
/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/n019023l.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular Italic
/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/n019024l.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold Italic
/usr/share/fonts/type1/texlive-fonts-recommended/uhvr8ac.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular Condensed
/usr/share/fonts/type1/texlive-fonts-recommended/uhvro8ac.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular Condensed Italic
/usr/share/fonts/type1/texlive-fonts-recommended/uhvbo8a.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold Italic
/usr/share/fonts/type1/texlive-fonts-recommended/uhvr8a.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/n019023l.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular Italic
/usr/share/fonts/type1/texlive-fonts-recommended/uhvbo8ac.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold Condensed Italic
/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/n019024l.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold Italic
/usr/share/fonts/type1/texlive-fonts-recommended/uhvb8ac.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold Condensed
/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/n019004l.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Bold
/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/n019003l.pfb: Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular

# dpkg -S /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/n019003l.pfb
gsfonts-x11: /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/n019003l.pfb

# dpkg -S /usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/n019024l.pfb
gsfonts: /usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/n019024l.pfb

# dpkg -S /usr/share/fonts/type1/texlive-fonts-recommended/uhvr8a.pfb
texlive-fonts-recommended: /usr/share/fonts/type1/texlive-fonts-recommended/uhvr8a.pfb

With this configuration, LibreOffice shows a pretty confusing, or maybe confused, behaviour.

While the KDE System Settings font selection dialog shows all install weights for Nimbus Sans L, LibreOffice shows two different sets depending on whether I create a new document or load the existing one: (Also see screenshots.)

1; A new document: The default bold font face is missing, only Bold Condensed (both in straigth and italic styles) is
    offered. However, for normal font weight, the default regular type face is available.

2; The existing document: In this case LO only offers condensed type faces in straigt style, while only the regular width
    typefaces are offered for italic style.
    That's what messed up my document, LO seems to select the metrics of a condensed width font but uses the glyphs of a
    regular width font, causing the characters to touch each other. For printing, even the metrics of the regular width font
    seem to be applied, causing...

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Gunter Ohrner, nice job identifying the WORKAROUND of removing texlive-fonts-recommended. Cursorily, the expectation is when one has fonts with the same name provided in different font folders provided by different packages, all the fonts would be displayed with some distinguishable naming structure. However, I'm not terribly familiar with LibreOffice's font name resolution mechanism (if any). Hence, let us marked this Triaged against LibreOffice for now. As well, the issue you are reporting is an upstream one. It would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug to the developers of the software by following the instructions verbatim at http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/BugReport . If you have done so, please tell us the number of the upstream bug (or the link), so we can add a bugwatch that will inform us about the status. Thanks in advance.

Helpful bug reporting tips:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

[Adolfo Jayme Barrientos (fitojb)]

Gunter, please let us know if this change [1], which is included in LibreOffice 4.2.3, makes any improvement.

[1]: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=b3a3b78d22f1b2bb3c3debe21d75c6b491858f83&h=libreoffice-4-2

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for libreoffice (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]