Font rendering problem in Writer on Mac OS X

I use many different fonts in my documents and accurate rendering is critical to my work. So far, I’ve been very happy with LibreOffice’s layout scheme, but there are some issues which seem specific to the Mac platform.

The main problem is that, sometimes, when using different styles (e. g. roman and italics) in the same sentence, the glyphs are not accurately rendered and appear deformed. Sometimes, glyphs in the italics fonts will “lean” on the roman glyphs next to them and add some unusual white space, possibly hiding parts of the roman font glyph. This also happens with whitespace characters, specifically with non-breaking spaces.

I’ve heard that LibreOffice on the Mac used ATSUI instead of Core Text for text rendering: is this the source of the problem?

Finally, the strangest part (from my point of view, at least) is that the deformed glyphs still appear deformed in a PDF exported from the .odt file! This seems to show that the appearance of the PDF explicitly depends on the visible state of the document at the time of exporting. Could anyone explain this behavior? Is it meant to be that way or not?

Hey @CyanCG – Did you ever find answers for your question(s)? Do you want to tag this question as a feature-request?

No, I never found any satisfying answer and yes, I would like to tag my question as such. How do I do that? I reckon that it is the right time to ask for this since, from LibreOffice 4.0 onwards, support for OS X 10.4 and lower will be dropped, so the ATSUI vs Core Text issue is now irrelevant.

@CyanCG – In my interface I see a “retag” link at the bottom of your question. Clicking that link allows me to edit the tags. You’ll probably get an AJAX-y drop-down list once you start typing “feature-request”. Ping me back with any questions.

Note: We’ve never decided what to do with q’s w/the feature-request tag. Ideally someone (dev? design team?) would look-in on this list of q’s periodically, but right now they’re just sitting here. If you really want this feature, please file a bug, especially re: the distorted glyphs. Thanks!

I shall file a bug. I know that there are already some similar bug reports, but I will make sure mine is well understood as relevant, non-redundant and important. Thanks!

@CyanCG – could you post a link to the bug# here as a comment?

(just trying to update older questions; once we have a bug #, we can mark this as resolved (as sent to the bugtracker) so it’s easier to find new q’s)

Thanks!

Indeed, many bugs have been filed and explain the problem very well. Here is the one that nails it the most: Bug 44887

@qubit1 – Wouldn’t it be better to mark such an answer as resolved, when the corresponding bug has been fixed? :wink:

@manj_k – Sure, but @CyanCG is going to have to do that. I can’t mark the answer as resolved for a week.

Do I just write [Resolved] at the beginning of the question title then?

@CyanCG – you can just click the checkmark to the left of my Answer :slight_smile:

Of course, what was I thinking! Thank you.