OK. So I have this Windows-made OpenOffice 1 document (.swx), which uses Arial Bold, a quite common font used in Microsoft Office. Opened in NeoOffice, it renders all instance of Arial Bold to... nothing. Zilch. Beautiful 0-pixel-per-character text. Remove the Bold and the text is rendered as usual.
The main developer of NeoOffice closed the bug as "not a bug": see the bug report. And I quote: "Closing as not a bug. NeoOffice does not synthesize fake fonts on the fly.".
Wow. If my memory serves me right, font variant "synthesis" was supported on the Mac since Macintosh System 1.0. Now I don't give a damn if the Carbon-based Java VM kludge you use supports it or not (actually, all non-hacked pure-Java applications on my Mac support it). This is a critical feature of all text processors in the past 30 years, and NeoOffice doesn't support it.
So I try the same thing in OpenOffice 3.0 Beta MacOSXIntel Aqua, and Arial Bold works flawlessly again.
I've been coping with NeoOffice-specific bugs for the past 2 years, but now enough is enough. The official OpenOffice port for Mac OS X with Aqua interface works perfectly with fonts rendering, even as a Beta.
Bye bye Neoffice, you sucked for the last time.
Published on May 21, 2008 at 13:02 EDT
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