OpenOffice.org and Fonts

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Warning: Draft version.

One of the strong points of OOo is the ability to exchange documents between platforms. The statement is that you need to have the correct fonts installed on all platforms (which is a reasonable condition). But unfortunately this does not work for the very popular fonts from International Typeface Corporation.

Ever since the first professional Postscript fonts hit the market, they have been causing problems. Why? Because there are so many of them.

Every average PC user nowadays knows about fonts. They're called "Times" and "Arial", and can be Normal (Regular), Bold, and Italic. But reality is a little bit more complex.

First, what we are calling "Times" is a generalisation of a broad family of typefaces, originally designed by Stanley Morison for the New York Times newspaper. "Times" is also called "Times Roman" or "Times New Roman".

Second, variations like Bold and Italic are really the tip of the iceberg. There are many more. To name a few:

Weight: Very (Ultra) Light, Light, Thin, Book, Medium, Demi (Semi), Bold, Heavy, Black.
Variation: Old Style, Modern, Old Style Figures, Proportional, Monospace, Even Width, Expanded, Condensed, Very (Ultra) Expanded, Very (Ultra) Condensed, Small Caps.

Then there are also classifications like "Square", "Sans", "Serif", "Script", and "Rounded".

The root of the problem is that there were no good standards for font classification, and every font company (foundry) used its own conventions on how to designate fonts and their characteristics.

So we get font names like "GaramondITCbyBT-BookCondItalic". This is a Garamond font (nice classical 17th century font), as designed by International Typeface Corporation (ITC), created by Bitstream (BT). It's weight is Book (somewhat lighter than normal), Condensed, and Italic. ITC's own version of this font is called "Garamond-BookCondensedItalic". Bitstream appends it's initials to the font name, before the variations, but Monotype Coroporation calls it's Arial version "ArialMT", with variants like "Arial-BoldMT".

If software programs were to show this in your font pick list, you would soon be overwhelmed with variations. So usually they try to reduce the complexity by trying to analyse what kind of font it is, and presenting it in a more simple way. OpenOffice.org does a real good job at this. So in your font list you see "Arial", and you can choose for the variants "Regular", "Italic", "Bold Italic", and "Bold". The "Black" variant, on the other hand, is called "Arial Black" and it has it's own variants "Regular", "Italic", "Bold Italic", and "Bold", all except "Regular" will be emulated by OOo.

Many fonts include the foundry in their names, to distinguish them from the same fonts from other foundries. We've seen "ArialMT", but there's also "ITC Garamond", "URW Palladio", and "Bitstream Vera". Probably because the ITC fonts were abundant in the early days of OOo (StarOffice), the designers decided to make life easier by stripping the ITC prefix. Note, only ITC. So instead of "ITC Garamond", "ITC Bookman", "ITC Avant Garde", "ITC Zapf Chancery", and "ITC Zapf Dingbats", you see only the more relevant names. Unfortunately, they only did this on Linux (and Unix) platforms. As a consequence, if you have Garamond from ITC installed on Linux and on Windows, you'll see it as "Garamond" on Linux, and as "ITC Garamond" on Windows. To make it worse, Windows comes with it's own Garamond, called "Garamond".

A document created on Windows that uses "ITC Garamond" will, when processed on Linux, not be able to find the correct font since Linux knows about "Garamond" only. And vice versa, a Linux document that uses ITC Garamond will have the name "Garamond" stored internally, and on Windows it will try to use the Windows version of Garamond which is significantly different.

I don't blame the designers for having made this decision. The whole font business on Unix platforms is a mess, and they try very hard to make is work as good as possible. But time has now shown that the particular decision to strip the ITC prefix was unfortunate and should be revoked.

Share my opinion? Vote for Issue 28610.