How do Ubuntu LibreOffice builds differ from vanilla LibreOffice builds?

This is an attempt to synchronise Question and Answers from AskUbuntu and Ask LibreOffice. The original question is here


I’ve got a question about LibreOffice that’s been bugging me since OpenOffice:

The versions of LO that come on the Ubuntu disc or from the PPA always have nice font rendering, but whenever I download and install the debs from the LO website, the font rendering in those versions looks terrible.

I know the Ubuntu builds include various patches and tweaks that aren’t in the vanilla debs, but could anyone help educate me about exactly how the Ubuntu builds of LO differ from the vanilla debs of LO, and if there is an easy way to apply those changes to the vanilla debs so I don’t have to wait so long for the PPA to update with the new version?


Making it a community wiki to give up any karma from other’s question

Edit: As for the font issue observed by the reporter, this is likely not caused by any patches or fixes in the source code itself. However, the LibreOffice Ubuntu packages are build on the Ubuntu release they are for, while the TDF builds are done on a very ancient generic Linux baseline for compatibility. As such, this “baseline” is missing many modern system libraries and thus is a bit more restricted in what it can do.

Synchronizing questions between the LO Ask site and the Ubuntu Ask site sounds like a great idea, but right now the LO Ask site is a bit cluttered and doesn’t have tools to du-duplicate questions or have enough mods to clear out old, answered questions.

Without some kind of framework to keep q’s automatically synchronized between the sites, I’m afraid that bringing such questions over to this site will just add to the confusion. Hopefully we’ll implement a fix on this site soon.

wouldn’t it be more sustainable if those modifications weren’t outside the LibreOffice build process I wonder. After all I asked what is the hold up with PPA versions, but this might in fact be the clue…

Mostly they arent, its the newer Ubuntu release they are build upon that makes the change.