openoffice font problems

Johannes Wiedersich

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Apr 22, 2009, 1:10:09 PM4/22/09

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For some documents that were apparently prepared with a proprietary
application for users of a proprietary OS, some characters (mainly greek
letters in mathematics) are not correctly displayed in openoffice.org. I
tried both lenny's and backport's 3.0.

Are there some free or non-free font packages that might fix this?

NB: I have ttf-mscorefonts-installer, among others.

Thanks,

Johannes

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Johannes Wiedersich

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Apr 22, 2009, 1:30:13 PM4/22/09

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Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
> For some documents that were apparently prepared with a proprietary
> application for users of a proprietary OS, some characters (mainly greek
> letters in mathematics) are not correctly displayed in openoffice.org. I
> tried both lenny's and backport's 3.0.

FWIW the document _prints_ fine from OO.o 3.0.

On screen, however, greek fonts are replaced by upright or slanted
rectangles.

Any hints, what's wrong?

Thankful regards,

Johannes

fonts.png

Sjoerd Hiemstra

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Apr 22, 2009, 6:00:14 PM4/22/09

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I _suspect_ that the 'Symbol' font has been used for the Greek
characters. (Could you check that?)
And the Symbol font is not installed by default. It's not in OO.o's
font drop-down list, right? It's not in msttcorefonts either.

So, you would have to get symbol.ttf from some Windows installation,
and install it just by putting it into /usr/local/share/fonts or into
~/.fonts .

I think it _prints_ fine because Cups has a font named Symbol in
/usr/share/cups/fonts. AFAICS, it's not meant for display on screen.

Johannes Wiedersich

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Apr 23, 2009, 3:30:13 AM4/23/09

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Sjoerd Hiemstra wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:27:50 +0200 Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
>> For some documents that were apparently prepared with a proprietary
>> application for users of a proprietary OS, some characters (mainly
>> greek letters in mathematics) are not correctly displayed in
>> openoffice.org. I tried both lenny's and backport's 3.0.
>>
>> FWIW the document _prints_ fine from OO.o 3.0.
>>
>> On screen, however, greek fonts are replaced by upright or slanted
>> rectangles.
>>
>> Any hints, what's wrong?
>
> I _suspect_ that the 'Symbol' font has been used for the Greek
> characters. (Could you check that?)

You are right!

> And the Symbol font is not installed by default. It's not in OO.o's
> font drop-down list, right? It's not in msttcorefonts either.

You are right!

> So, you would have to get symbol.ttf from some Windows installation,
> and install it just by putting it into /usr/local/share/fonts or into
> ~/.fonts .

Some searching on my system and with apt-file, dpkg -S, etc. revealed
that the package xfonts-mathml has some files that look relevant:

$ apt-file search Symbol\. |grep font
[...]
xfonts-mathml: /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/Symbol.afm
xfonts-mathml: /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/Symbol.pfb
xfonts-mathml: /usr/share/fonts/type1/mathml/Symbol.afm
xfonts-mathml: /usr/share/fonts/type1/mathml/Symbol.pfb
[...]

Installing xfonts-mathml fixed it.

Thanks for your help!

Cheers,
Johannes