Thought I'd post this for the next poor sap that goes thru X font hell.

It turns out that X font handling has changed some in the 8 years since I last fiddled 
with it.  The handling of fonts at the X server level always felt kinda hokey, and now 
it seems the fonts can be dealt with by a central server, creatively called an X font 
server.  This is "a good thing."  This way fonts can be managed centrally and yield 
consistent results across all X servers.

<WHINE>
We went thru some head trauma to ensure that there were zero static IP addresses known 
to the individual Mandrake boxes (X terminals).  We used DHCP for the boxes themselves 
and XDMCP broadcasts to let the X servers discover an XDM server.  Sadly, with xfs, 
those days seem gone.  Now on the command line I have to tell the X server where to 
find the font server.  If I ever need to move xfs, I will have to go around the 
company and reconfig everyone's X terminal.  Bummer.
</WHINE>

Other than that, I solved this beast.  I received some very helpful and needed advice 
from several people on the openoffice problems I had and I truly appreciate it.

To recap, if openoffice is running on a machine and displaying on another machine, 
then libXrender.so.1 needs to be on the client machine, the machine where openoffice 
is running.

Fonts also need to be installed, but not, as was suggested to me, where openoffice is 
running.  The fonts either need to be in the font path on the machine where X is 
running or the fonts need to be accessible by the font server that X is using.  On 
Mandrake 8.0 (and probably other distros) the default behavior is for the X server to 
latch on to a font server running locally.  To keep font management central, tell the 
X server to use a different font server and make the fonts available to that server.

I now have openoffice running correctly!

Thanks again for all of the help!

Marty

_______________ Forward Header _______________
Subject:        Re: [Render] Re: XFt on Solaris
Author: Herbert Duerr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date:            Wed, 27 Mar 2002 16:06:30 -0700

Hi,

marty scholes wrote:
> I soft linked libXrender.so.1 to libXrender.so.1.1 to see what would happen.
> Openoffice quit complaining but the text was still ugly and marginally readable.

This sounds like there are no good scalable fonts installed on that box.
Copy some truetype fonts like Arial or Times into
$(OOHOME)/share/fonts/truetype
or add the font directory to the X11 font path.

By the way, one of the important differences between OpenOffice.org
and StarOffice is that SO comes with some nice fonts.

-- 
Best regards
Herbert Duerr

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