Re: emergency: Openoffice, Fonts, what a mess
Hi Christian,
On Wed, 2004-01-07 at 03:12, Christian Schnobrich wrote:
> today, I did the usual apt-get update && apt-get upgrade on my
> girfriend's machine.
> In the process, the Openoffice backport was upgraded from 1.0.xx to
> 1.1.xx. This has severe side effects.
I'm sorry to hear this. This particular upgrade has had a longer period
of testing than most versions do, so I'm surprised that no-one else has
reported this. It has been available since December 15th, and judging
by the number of places I saw people talking about the 'woody-test'
repo, it seems to have been downloaded and in use in quite a few places
already. I moved 'woody-test' to 'woody' yesterday, so that would have
caused your upgrade and subsequent problems.
The font management for 1.1.0 has changed quite a bit in the
testing/unstable branches and now uses the 'fontconfig' library to
provide fonts. But because Woody does not have fontconfig, the backport
you installed is supposed to still use the same mechanisms as before to
find fonts and you should not have noticed a difference.
So you have the options of downgrading the packages or fixing the
problem. If you are able to contact me directly it might be quickest to
fix the problem. You can reach us on IRC, server irc.freenodenet,
channel #debian-oo. Otherwise a downgrade will probably take longer but
be safer than spending hours trying to work around the problem. I do
have a few suggestions further down, though.
Downgrading
-----------
I kept the old packages on the master server, so I have recreated the
repository as it was before the upgrade for you, and named it
woody-old. Judging by your mail headers you are in Germany, so use the
freenet.de server, which I have been updating while writing this mail.
Change your openoffice line in sources.list to read:
deb http://ftp.freenet.de/pub/debian-openoffice/ woody-old main contrib
and run apt-get update. Apt will _not_ downgrade OOo automatically, so
you'll need to do it by hand. You need to downgrade at least these
packages: openoffice.org, openoffice.org-bin,
openoffice.org-l10-[language], where I guess you'll have -en or -de
installed, and openoffice.org-debian-files. Downgrades are not tested
so you might find it easiest to remove the packages first and then
reinstall. The backport does not require newer versions of libraries,
so you should find that you can downgrade OOo without needing to change
versions of anything else.
Also, you may find that the upgraded user settings do not work properly
or cause problems - if things still look wrong trying moving
~/.sversionrc and ~/.openoffice somewhere else and restarting OOo, which
will reset the user settings back to their defaults.
> My own approach to the problem will be to install as many fonts as I can
> in the hope that things will be in order once the fonts she originally
> used are available again. However, I don't know where to get them other
> than by picking packages through aptitude. I think I installed
> everything that seemed appropriate for western europe, but I'll look
> again after this is sent.
My guess would be that it is not missing fonts that is the problem, but
instead that OOo is no longer finding your already-installed fonts.
>
> In the meantime, she'll start going over her files manually.
>
> She says the fonts she used were "Times" and "Symbol".
> IIRC, those were from Microsoft.
You should be able to find out which fonts she had by moving the cursor
over the text, and looking at the font name. If she was really using
Times and Symbol, those are not fonts from Microsoft (MS have Times New
Roman and Wingdings), and they are bitmapped fonts, which are very poor
quality and not suitable for presentation work. If that really is the
case, you might find that you can use the 'font substitution' feature to
substitute Times New Roman for Times.
> Someday, I had a package that
> downloaded them. I don't even know which package that was, or why they
> now seem to be gone.
It is msttcorefonts, and they should be available to OOo as long as you
have x-ttcidfont-conf installed too.
Chris
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