OpenOffice and Lucida Sans
So Alia has been doing a TEFL/TESOL course over the last few weeks to gain a qualification to teach english as a foreign language. I think, until this course she had been sceptical on using OpenOffice as opposed to MS Word. Today, she told me that she has not found OpenOffice a hindrance. Rather, the opposite.
Alia is not allowed to install any applications on her college computers, quite rightfully. So to use OpenOffice there, she uses Portable OpenOffice running from her USB stick. This, she says works very well except for a sluggish startup time. Exporting to doc messes up her page layout, so that is not really an option. What is interesting is she uses the Phonetic alphabet which she only found in the Lucida Sans font. So, she has been using the Macbook running openoffice under Gnome at home and Portable OpenOffice at college on their Windows PCs.
Today, she is handing in an assignment and on Fridays I hack on the Macbook at work. So, easy, she can use OpenOffice on the desktop PC we have at home. However her Phonetic alphabet appeared as square boxes. It turned out OpenOffice did not have Lucida Sans on the desktop. I am using the same version of OpenOffice and the same Java virtual machine on both and the same fonts are installed (100dpi, 75dpi, Type1, Truetype etc.). So this took me by surprise. In the end after 1/2 an hour trying various things to find Lucida Sans on the Macbook, I gave up and copied the one from the Sun JVM into the .fonts directory. Now magically, OpenOffice was displaying the font. It’s weird because I did not have this in my .fonts directory on the Macbook.
March 22nd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
You are a very smart person! No, but seriously, that was a really good post. Thanks : )