[Hardy] font rendering in openoffice not consistent with other applications

[Jan Rathmann]

Binary package hint: openoffice.org

The font rendering in OpenOffice on the current Hardy amd64 live-cd (20080221) does not fit to the rest of the gnome applications. You can easily spot this on the screenshot attached below.

Kind regards,
Jan

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

I don't see a difference in font rendering, they are both antialiased. The two applications appear to use different fonts though.

Chris

[Jan Rathmann (kaiserclaudius)]

I investigated a little further and I think OpenOffice uses the same font for the user interface as "normal" gnome applications, since "Use system font for user interface" in the OpenOffice configuration is enabled by default (Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org -> View).

It seems to have an influence which hinting method is selected in System -> Appearance -> Fonts. By default "Best shapes" is selected which means hinting is set to "medium" (if you click on "Details"). If you select "Best contrast" instead, hinting is set to "full" which doesn't make a visible difference to "normal" gnome-application compared to "Best shape". But the OpenOffice interface looks now the same than gnome applications (if you restart OO).

You can see the different of the look of OO in the two screenshots attached below. What I found interesting is that also the (default) document font is rendered differently, as you can see, to me the document text looks better from a subjective point of view with medium hinting.

Kind regards,
Jan

[Jan Rathmann (kaiserclaudius)]

This issue (if if was really one) seems to be gone on current Hardy.

Kind regards,
Jan