OpenOffice "squeezes" documents' wraparound

[spiffytech]

OpenOffice on openSuse 11 has a problem on my machine with wrapping around documents and goofing up their formatting. I've attached screenshots showing what openSuse's OOo does to my timesheet and how OOo normaly displays it. It's like it zoomed in, but the zoom is at 100% and decreasing it doesn't fix the wraparound issue.

I've seen a problem similar to this in OOo Calc, which shows fewer cells in the default view than other distros. Maybe they're related?

[coomac]

Which is which? I assume opensuse's OOo is the first image. Well, I'm not sure what I should be looking at, but the first thing I noticed was that the font sizes are different. If the font size is larger, then no surprise the first one is wrapping the way it is since the table dimensions remain the same.

[AdmiralFubar]

Not only are the fonts different sizes, they are different fonts as well. Try setting the fonts to the same font in each document.

the next thing to check in calc is the cell formatting. There is an option to wrap text in a cell automaticly. I presume it is checked.

document zoom is for viewing a smaller portion of the document, it has nothingt o do with formatting the content of the document.

[spiffytech]

I've compared the document in OpenOffice on different platforms and the font/sizes match up. The font is (supposed to be) Times New Roman. openSuse's OOo indicates it's showing in that font; I (finally) tracked down a package for the MS TTF package (Ms Truetype Fonts on openSUSE 11 « Memoirs and Musings of Loki-undergod ; openSuse documentation said it was in the YaST update tool, but that's apparently changed in v. 11.0) and lo and behold, the document appeared as it should!

I think that either 1. OOo used a free approximation font (which needs some fixing) or 2. OOo just reports what the font was supposed to be and used something else entirely for the document rendering.

Does anyone know if the openSuse devs have considered a helper app or desktop icon for things like the TTF package and other proprietary technologies? I think it gives a bad impression when the openSuse OOo renders poorly and other versions don't. If no one knows, I'll suggest it in the bug tracker.

[JJMT]

Also looks to me like the page sizes are different. Is one A4 while the other letter?

[Wrath5000]

Do you have anti-aliasing enabled for fonts? I've found that slight or medium anti-aliasing is the most pleasing to my eyes. I know that's a matter of personal taste, though.

Glad I could help, spiffytech, and thanks for reading!

[enderandrew]

Originally Posted by JJMT

Also looks to me like the page sizes are different. Is one A4 while the other letter?

With the English locale, openSUSE keeps defaulting to A4 page size. In the United States, Letter should be the default.

I also really wish the installer gave people the option to install the MS Core Fonts during install to prevent problems like this. If they will package proprietary stuff like RealPlayer, Flash, Java, etc. then why not the MS Core Fonts or codecs?