Christopher R. Carlen wrote:

Actually what's happening is that if I select Helvetica 12, 14, 16, 18, for instance, Star Office uses only the 18pt. font for all choices, but squeezes the characters into the space of a 12pt., if I chose 12pt. If I chose 10pt., it is OK. So there is a problem with SO choosing the screen font. I have used xlsfonts and it shows all the point sizes on the system. They print Ok, but on the screen it doesn't scale them correctly. This is a serious problem if I can't fix it, because I need SO or else I have to consider using Windows.

I have discovered some things, and a crude way to fix it, but I don't know how to make it permanent, nor do I really understand it: If as root, I run the program /opt/office52/program/spadmin and Add Fonts|Initialize Paths|Ok then several things happen: 1. A dialog box appears that says: "The font directories will now be added to the XFontPath to make them available to the X server. ... If you want to use these directories only in SO, set the env. variable SAL_FONTPATH to these directories (separate multiple dirs with ':') before starting SO." 2. A long list of messages appear in the terminal from which I started the spadmin program. They look like: [snipped a very long list before what I'm showing] makepsres: Could not identify file ./z003034l.pfb. makepsres: Could not identify file ./z003034l.pfm. makepsres: Could not identify file ./override/fonts.dir. makepsres: Could not identify file ./fonts.dir. [that is the end of the list] The path from which I started spadmin was /opt/office52/program and there is a fonts.dir file there, but none of the other files exist here. Whatever makepsres commands are being attempted don't seem to be succeeding. However, now SO screen fonts look correct! It also causes the default font settings for the Star Office word processor to change to Times instead of some Lucida font. But them main thing is this seems to get the desired result. So this fixes things, sort of. Now how to make this permanent? I shouldn't need to do this operation as root every time I start X. I have tried the same operation but before clicking Ok, I removed various font paths from the list. When I remove the paths: /opt/office52/share/fonts/type1 and /opt/office52/share/fonts/75dpi it still fixes SO. However, if I remove the standard X font paths from the list, then it doesn't fix SO. So it would seem that something is preventing SO from registering the fonts that are being used by X. When I run the Printer Setup utility as a user from within SO, then there are problems. It complains: "The file [some path]/fonts.dir file [from each of the paths in the list] could not be opened for editing. Therefore the font names of Star Office and the XServer may no longer match. If you experience problems [edit]. Please ensure that you can write the file [some path]/fonts.dir. Running the add fonts procedure as a user fails. I hoped that the environment variable SAL_FONTPATH could help things. I set it to: SAL_FONTPATH=/usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/Type1:/usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi or SAL_FONTPATH=/opt/office52/share/fonts/type1:/opt/office52/share/fonts/75dpi or many other possibilities, and it doesn't seem to help anything. Does anyone understand what is going on and can explain how to get SO to work "normally" without having to mess around like this every time I start X? Thank you for comments. ____________________________________ Christopher R. Carlen Principal Laser/Optical Technologist Sandia National Laboratories CA USA crcarle@sandia.gov