Font Problem with Online Help

How to Look into Problems with Fonts in the Online Help

Status: Initial draft, not yet reviewed.

Problem

On the Online Help of OpenOffice.org,

1. Most letters are rendered as a rectangle while some English letters are rendered appropriately.
2. Most letters disappear while some English letters are shown.

Investigation

1. Help - OpenOffice.org Help
2. Click on the right pane of the Online Help to focus on it.
3. Press Ctrl-A (Pressing a key 'A' with holding a key 'Control' or something like that) to select all of the contents.
4. Press Ctrl-C to copy it.
5. File - New - HTML Document (or Text Document).
6. Press Ctrl-V to paste the contents to Writer.
7. Locate a cursor on the text.
8. Click on the Font Name text field of the Toolbar 'Formatting.'
9. Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C to copy the name(s) of the font(s).
10. Click on somewhere in the body text of the Writer.
11. Ctrl-V to paste the name(s).
12. Look into the list of font name(s), delimited with a semicolon if there are more than one font names.
13. Ctrl-A to select the entire texts.
14. Specify a proper font name from the choices and see if the texts become correctly showed.

Note that it seems that some HTML attributes will be disposed during copying the contents from Online-Help to Writer. So, when you try to find font names applied to a text, choose a text whose style is one of the heading styles such as "Heading 1", "Heading 2", ...

Experiment

1. The list of fonts is specified here, or in the similar folder.
   C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 3\Basis\help\ Language Code \default.css
   e.g.

   body, p, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, .listitem, .listitemintable, .tablecontent, .tablecontentintable
   	{ font-family: "Bitstream Vera Sans",Arial,Helvetica,Lucida,Geneva,Helmet,sans-serif,"Andale Sans UI","Arial Unicode MS","Lucida Sans Unicode",Tahoma; }

2. Copy the file to another file to preserve it as an original file.
3. Open the file with an text editor such as WordPad.
4. Copy the proper font name shown in the Font Name text field on the Toolbar.
5. Paste it at the top of the list like this.
   

   	{ font-family: "FONTNAME X","Bitstream Vera Sans", ...

6. Save the file and close it.
7. Exit OpenOffice.org.
8. Exit Quickstarter if it is running. See Documentation/OOoAuthors_User_Manual/Getting_Started/Using_the_Quickstarter_under_Windows.
9. Start OpenOffice.org.
10. Do the steps described in the Investigation and see if the texts become showed appropriately.

Note that if the font name is written in non-ASCII letters, be sure the file is encoded in UTF-8 when it is being saved.

Fixing

1. The .css file is located here.
   e.g.
   • en_US in the trunk: trunk/helpcontent2/source/auxiliary/en-US/default.css
   • bn of DEV300_m56: tags/DEV300_m56/helpcontent2/source/auxiliary/ Language Code /default.css
2. There are five .css files. All files are expected to updated appropriately.
   • default.css
   • highcontrast1.css
   • highcontrast2.css
   • highcontrastblack.css
   • highcontrastwhite.css

   e.g. trunk/helpcontent2/source/auxiliary/en-US/
   By default, one of the .css files will be automatically chosen depending on the Theme of desktop. You can explicitly specify it as a style at Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - View.

3. File an issue in the IssueTracker to ask a responsible person to integrate your experiments.

Background

1. All pages are stored in the .jar files installed at
   e.g. For StarWriter,
   C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 3\Basis\help\ Language Code \swriter.jar
   Since a .jar file is a .zip file, so you could see the inside by copying swriter.jar to Copy of swriter.jar and renaming it with Copy of swriter.jar.zip.
2. Each file is written in XML.
3. The XML file will be translated into HTML using relevant XSLT files.
   • C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 3\Basis\help\main_transform.xsl
   • trunk/helpcontent2/source/auxiliary/main_transform.xsl
4. The translated HTML contents in combination with some CSS files will be rendered with an embedded HTML browser-like function.