Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-xorg (24 mails)

[Rainer Krienke <krienke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

sorry this is a little lengthy but the bug is a little hard to
describe...

I have a problem that I guess is in the fontrendering of XFree86.  I
run a  suse9.0 desktop machine as well as a suse9.0 laptop both with
Xfree 4.3.0.1 but I also tried the last stable release 4.3.0 (from
suse8.2).  The desktop has a resolution of  1280x1024 at 90x96 DPI
(xdpyinfo). The display size value was determined by the X-Server  and
seems to be correct when I measure my display size and calucate the DPi
on my own the result is the same. The laptop has  1400x1050 pixel at
124x124 DPI (xdpyinfo). In this case the server could not determine the
display size so I measured the display (285mmx215mm)  and calculated
the DPI and wrote a DisplaySize Option in my XF86Config file.

The strange thing I observed now is that in WYSIWYG applications like
Staroffice and koffice identical fonts (tried Thorndale and
Times-New-Roman) seem to have different dimensions on the screen
depending on the machine the text is displayed on.  On one system they 
seem to be some percent wider. In eg a presentation document this leads
to  the very annoying fact, that on one system eg some  text is
displayed on one  line and on the other system the same text is broken
up into two lines.  Actually its not only the same text, and the very
same document but also the same linux system with identical Staroffice
and Koffice and Xfree installations. As a result the complete layout of
such a document can change if  the same document is displayed on 
another (as far as software is concerned)  "identical" system. You can
take a look at this effect with two screenshots I made. The first show
the document on my desktop, the second on my laptop (each graphic is
about 40KBytes):

http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke/xfree/xfreebug90x96dpi.jpg
http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke/xfree/xfreebug124x124dpi.jpg

I first thought this might be a trouble of the Beta Version of Xfree that came 
with suse9.0 and compiled  XFree86-4.3.0-111 used in suse8.2 on my system and 
installed it on both machines. Now again on each seperate machine the 
linebreaks changed compared to the suse9.0 Xfree version, but unfortunately 
the very same document still shows different linebreaks on both systems. 
Another effekt is that graphics placed somewhere on the page (not anchored in 
the paragraph) are really always at the same position but the text around 
them varies due to the different fontrendering.  I also tought if this could 
be a staroffice bug (actually this was my first thought),  but since koffice 
shows the same problem, I think it is not.

Everybody who has two machines with different display resolutions should
be able to reproduce this bug. Just Create a A4 landscape document, use
large fonts (eg 32 points)
write a long line of text across the page save the document and then 
take a look at the linebreaks on both systems using the local displays of each 
machine. 

As far as I can say this is a problem of the fontscaling machine but I have no 
clue if it is really a bug or perhaps a misconfiguration of my system? Anyone 
any idea?  Any advice is welcome. If someone needs more information I'll try 
to provide it. 

Thanks for any help
Rainer
-- 
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Rainer Krienke, Universitaet Koblenz, Rechenzentrum, Raum A022
Universitaetsstrasse 1, 56070 Koblenz, Tel: +49 261287 -1312, Fax: -1001312
Mail: krienke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Web: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke
Get my public PGP key: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke/mypgp.html
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