Bugs and Missing Features
Most of the bugs I found are related to font handling. I use the Debian OpenOffice.org packages, so some of those are probably caused by the fontconfig patches, some are probably not.
Update: I even tried an OOo 2.0 beta included on the SuSE 9.3 DVD that was bundled with a c't issue (a german computer magazine). What can I say? Even the reported font handling stuff has not been fixed :(. So goodbye OpenOffice for any serious work.
OpenType Fonts are not Supported on Linux
This is a major showstopper. I do not know whether this is related to the fontconfig patches or not. The fonts are ok (freetype can display them, I tried ftview). Fontconfig accepts them (they show up in fc-list). Other applications can use them. It is only OpenOffice.org that loses. Recently I found out that when I try to use fonts with more or other than the standard faces regular, bold, italic, bold&italic, other programs suck, too. Even very fundamental ones like the Gnome font settings program. Needless to say that fontconfig seems to handle it right, at least fc-list looks ok.
As expected, when I converted an opentype font to truetype using fontforge, OpenOffice.org was able to use it. I wrote a quick and dirty script for fontforge, that converts one font to truetype and call fontforge for every opentype font:
Then I use a shell command like
(The for loop could probably done within the script, but I know how to do a loop in bash and do not in fontforge). This generates several formats but truetype is amongst them so I did not investigate any further.
Small Caps are not Used in OpenType Fonts
I verified this in OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 on Windows (I could not even test this on Linux as OpenType fonts seem to be ignored right now, possibly due to the fontconfig patches, see above). I installed an OpenType font containing small capitals. Then I typed two lines of texts and formatted the first line with Format > Character... > Font Effects > Effects > Small Capitals. Then I "typed" the second line using Insert > Special Character... inserting small capitals contained in the font. The difference is obvious: OpenOffice.org uses poor man's small caps even though proper small caps are contained in the font:
Loading the font with pfaedit/fontforge clearly shows that the small capitals are properly placed at Unicode points Asmall to Zsmall. OpenOffice.org should use real small caps when they are there.
Small Caps are not Used in TrueType Fonts
Seems like real small caps are never used. Now that I converted an opentype font with small caps to truetype, I see that it does not work here, either.
Weird font family handling
I encountered this one when I tried to use LaTeX's Computer Modern (EC) fonts from the cm-super package. This package consists of several Type1 fonts. All the fonts in the package have the family name "Computer Modern". Even fonts like Computer Modern Sans Serif or Computer Modern Typewriter have the family name "Computer Modern". They have "Sans Serif", or "Typewriter" respectively, as part of their full name. E.g. in sfsi1200.pfa:
/FullName (Computer Modern Sans Serif Slanted) def /FamilyName (Computer Modern) def
OpenOffice.org does not seem to like this. This looks like a general problem and does not seem to be limited to the EC fonts. For some fonts it seems OOo only likes the four standard faces regular, bold, italic, bold&italic, for other fonts it shows faces like light. It definitely did not like me feeding it the EC fonts. I could not test if that is caused by the fontconfig patches or just made a little worse by them or whatever. I should probably just try using the unmodified EC fonts on Windows and file a bug report. This problem pointed me to the fontconfig patches because I started a thread on news.gmane.org.
Limited Outline Numbering
When trying to copy LaTeX's look, I tried to change the outline numbering (Tools > Outline Numbering...) to get chapter headings like
Introduction
Note the line break after “Chapter 1”. I did not find a way to set the “Separator After” to something like “\n” (newline). Maybe there is a way to insert newlines but it seems to be well hidden. So I gave up and set it to a single space to get at least
Limited Index/Table Formatting
I tried to mimic the LaTeX table of contents look, but I failed at several places. Formatting capabilitied are rather limited and there is even a bug.
I set the “Fill character” for a tab to “.”, that was ok (btw, why am I limited to only four single characters?). But when I set a “Character Style”, OOo did not honor the style's expanded spacing setting. So the dots look rather squashed, see the screenshot below (“Kapitel” is german for “chapter”).
Furthermore I cannot freely format the index entries. Like I said above I set the outline numbering “Separator Before” to “Chapter ”. I did not find a way to change that in the index (specifically I wanted to omit the “Chapter”).
