Google Font: Arimo, bug in Calc and Writer

English
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#1

I noticed that this font is rendered with minor flaws, in normal vriting really visible also at small sizes such as 10pt the first bug found is about the letters V and O in lowecase, for example found in words like ex novo and many others. I have checked the online font and it doesn’t bear such bug, I also tried to replace my version of Arimo with a new one and the bug is still present. Using the font on other apps the bug is not present instead.

edit: here is an example of the extra spacing between v and o respect other pairs. The bug is only visually on writer, it is good on PDF and printed docs.

In the picture it seems that the o is shifted toward its right in the character spacing, we see a really close right margin to the next letter and more space on the left.

#2

The same bug also applies to SO and SU and possibly other combinations.

#3

And what exactly is the bug? Could you provide a screenshot?

You can’t expect others to install this font. You even did not mention the LO version nor the operating system. Both informations would most likely be necessary to trace your problem.

#4

I installed the font set from Google, and do not see a problem with any of the 4 basic stylings (bolding/italic combos), nor with kerning which works fine as far as I can tell. Tried with 4pt, 12pt and 48pt sizes, and the rendering in normal edit window is as expected.

Did you actually install the font, or do you have a file just requesting the font? Writer will display the preferred font for selected text even when it is not installed on your system. In such cases rendering will pick that font from those available on your system which, according to certain parameters, is deemed to be most similar.

Do the flaws appear also in page preview? … in PDF export? … printed to paper?

Writer will use “fast rendering” when editing. If spacing info in the file does not correspond well with glyphs’ bounding boxes, this will for some fonts yield a “less than optimal” display, to say the least. Preparing for output (which is also a part of the page preview process) will often fix this.

#5

@Cookievore, @keme I have added a screenshot.

#6

I see the issue you mention when I view the text with stroke width approaching pixel size. It looks to me like your screenshot also has that zoom level.

When I zoom in, the effect is hardly visible. If I use File - Print preview and zoom in, I see no issue.

Did you try zoom, and/or the preview facility?

#7

This is a bug in LibreOffice.
Has nothing to do with the font.
You can test other fonts at smaller sizes (e.g. 10pt) and you will see the same thing.
As you zoom in and out at smaller sizes you will see the text spacing jump around.

Since the “upgrades” of v5.3 this is worse.
The previous text rendering engines had greater precision in character positioning, and better anti-aliasing.
Now the positioning calculations are done in LO and lack precision and have rounding errors.
This is the main problem bug: Bug 103322 - Use floating point for glyph positioning in VCL
There are other issues too (anti-aliasing problems), but that is the main reason why you see the odd gaps in character positioning.

This gets reported probably once a week here – does not appear it will be fixed anytime soon.

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#8

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