Re: emergency: Openoffice, Fonts, what a mess

From: Chris Halls (halls_at_debian.org)
Date: 01/07/04

  • Next message: Dameon Wagner: "Re: Are there any woody r1->r2 update ISO's?" 
    To: Debian-User Mailing List <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2004 09:36:55 +0100

    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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