Libreoffice is seriously messed up in OS 13.1 KDE

[londondaveuk]

Hi All,

I have a real problem with Libreoffice is Opensuse 13.1 KDE. Most of the time the text for menus, column and row numbers is just garbled -it looks awful.

I have installed the nvidia driver for this dell precision 380 (x11-video-nvidiaG02), libreoffice-kde4 was installed along with libreoffice. I tried removing libreoffice-kde4 and using libreoffice-gnome but that made no difference. I am using the qtcurve theme for gtk2 and kde4. Here is a picture of how it looks:



Any ideas on how I can fix this?

Cheers for any help.

[wolfi323]

Any ideas on how I can fix this?

Hm, are you sure the KDE4 integration was really working? If you have "ibus" installed, it is disabled. In that case I would suggest to uninstall "ibus", install "libreoffice-kde4" again and see if the fonts are better now.

Not sure if that helps though...

You don't have font problems with any other program, right?

Maybe try to change the font settings in LibreOffice's "View" options ("Use System Font for User Interface", "Font Antialiasing").

[londondaveuk]

Thanks wolfi323,

These are the ibus packages installed at the moment:

ibus-1.5.4-8.1.i586
libibus-1_0-5-1.5.4-8.1.i586

Is it safe to remove ibus completely? I thought it was needed for some types of input?

Cheers

[anika200]

Thanks wolfi323,

These are the ibus packages installed at the moment:

ibus-1.5.4-8.1.i586
libibus-1_0-5-1.5.4-8.1.i586

Is it safe to remove ibus completely? I thought it was needed for some types of input?

Cheers

That is a really good qustion Londondaveuk, I too have had these font hiccups before and never heard anything about ibus at the time.
Wolfi323, can you tell us how these things might be related?

[wolfi323]

That is a really good qustion Londondaveuk, I too have had these font hiccups before and never heard anything about ibus at the time.
Wolfi323, can you tell us how these things might be related?

The "ibus" package effectively disables the KDE4 integration. (https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=851982)
So you have to uninstall it to actually make that integration work. I don't know if that would fix your problems, but at least it _could_ make a difference.

And just remove the package "ibus" (and its dependencies). libibus is needed by some other packages (on my systen that's gnome-control-center, gnome-settings-daemon and plasma-addons).

ibus is only needed for being able to input some asian characters. (Chinese, Korean, ...) If you want to do that, you shouldn't uninstall it of course, although there are alternatives like fcitx.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Input_Bus

[londondaveuk]

Thanks wolfi & anika,

I removed the ibus package (with deps) and set the libreoffice theme to oxygen and it seems to have stabilised- if I use the galaxy theme I get the font problems in the picture above?

There seems to be something messed up with libreoffice under KDE4.

Thanks for your help.

[wolfi323]

I removed the ibus package (with deps) and set the libreoffice theme to oxygen and it seems to have stabilised- if I use the galaxy theme I get the font problems in the picture above?

Could you please tell me where you set the theme?

I can only find the "Symbol size and Symbol style" setting in "View". (could be named slightly different, I'm using it in german)
The symbol style should be set to "Automatic" by default and use oxygen on KDE. But even if I explicitely set it to galaxy, there's absolutely no change at all regarding the fonts (the option's name wouldn't imply it anyway).

OTOH, there's the option "Use system font for the user interface" right below that as I already mentioned. If that is enabled (which it is by default), LO should just use your KDE's font settings, not anything from any theme. Here the kde4 integration might come into play of course.
But even if I disable that and select the symbol style to galaxy, I can't reproduce your problem here.

[john_hudson]

In Tools>Options you can apply a Firefox Persona under Personalization but otherwise you can only change the icon style under View and the Colours under Appearance.

[londondaveuk]

Hi All,

After my last post i started libreoffice and had mangled fonts again, so I looked for a fix. This is a common problem if you use the nvidia graphics driver which is pretty much essential in Opensuse 13.1.

The solution is:

1. Start up system-settings (for kde), go to application appearance -> fonts
2. In 'use anti-aliasing', click on configure and un-tick subpixel hinting (if ticked), set anti-aliasing to disabled and click apply
3. In 'use anti-aliasing' reset to enable and click apply

That should be it, for some reason this works, don't ask me why - it worked for me.

To set the theme in libreoffice, go to view in options and click on the drop down list with a theme name, it's under 'icon size and style' - I am using galaxy again without problems.

[wolfi323]

To set the theme in libreoffice, go to view in options and click on the drop down list with a theme name, it's under 'icon size and style' - I am using galaxy again without problems.

Right, that's what I found as well as mentioned.
But that should only influence the look of the icons, not anything font related.

Anyway, good to hear that you found a solution for your problem.

I guess the reason why your procedure works at all is because it creates a fixed font configuration in ~/.config/font-config, which overrides the standard system defaults.
This is already created even when you just enter that settings dialog though, so I'd guess that not all of your steps would have really been necessary.