LibreOffice Branding and Documentation

These are MS licensed fonts, using them in free software manuals would be
suboptimal from a philosophical standpoint..

Deja Vu and Bitstream Vera families are installed by OOo, l presume therefore
libreO does the same.

cheers
GL

I guess it is OK if you have enough faith to let programmes install fonts on their own. It's just that not every computer is the same. Some people enjoy installing many fonts on their own, but I thought there was a maximum amount that you could install on a windows machine, maybe I am wrong. But what if there were and it caused your machine to fail?

IMO there should always be a warning window that will let a user accept or not accept installation of "extras" and that the software should not install any of these without user knowledge and permission.

Marc

Hello Michael,

Op 4/11/2010 9:38, Michael Wheatland schreef:

I have made a mock up document with the LibreOffice branding and colour scheme.
It also includes the number outline system, which personally I love
the professional look.

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B93nEslnhQO_YjAwMDE1ZDctNDM3MC00MTE0LTk5NDItNzlhZGFjNWQyODlh&hl=en&authkey=CKSL9MgJ

What do you all think?

It is nice to have the LibreOffice green in the documentation, but do not exagerate on the use of other colours. I noticed 4 shades of blue in the text, and the screenshots might still have another shade of blue. It looks to me that various types of fonts have been used as well, which, in my opinion, should be minimised.

Just my 2 €cents

Best regards

I don't understand the "permission" aspect of having LibreOffice install fonts automatically. If a user is voluntarily installing the program, then they should accept whatever modifications the program performs.

a) Does a user expect an office suite to install additional fonts?

b) Can their OS survive the addition of fonts?

How many fonts can be installed in Win7 before it blows up? I don't
remember the number, but it is low enough that people can, and do hit
the limit, just by installing additional non-MS software.

Windows is not the only OS that can blow up, because too many fonts are
installed. Admittedly, users have to work at installing fonts, for Linux
to blow up.

one thing if LibreOffice was installing a virus--it's simply installing fonts which provide for a better user experience. It seems like it would

When an OS blows up because of too many fonts, the effect is the same as
if the OS had been hit by a virus.

jonathon

Hi everyone,

b) Can their OS survive the addition of fonts?

How many fonts can be installed in Win7 before it blows up? I don't

remember the number, but it is low enough that people can, and do hit
the limit, just by installing additional non-MS software.

Windows is not the only OS that can blow up, because too many fonts are
installed. Admittedly, users have to work at installing fonts, for Linux
to blow up.

one thing if LibreOffice was installing a virus--it's simply installing
fonts which provide for a better user experience. It seems like it would

When an OS blows up because of too many fonts, the effect is the same as
if the OS had been hit by a virus.

This is possible? Never heard about that :S I do a lot of graphic design and
I do have several hundred of fonts, really, and I never had problems with
it.

I would strongly support LibreOffice installing up to around 20 open
source fonts and I would love to see the Liberation and Droid fonts
added to the default install.

People are installing LibreOffice because of it's open and free
philosophy (or maybe just because it's cheap), so we should provide
the end user with an overall experience which encompasses the full
open source package, including fonts.
How would you feel if you were inspired by the open source office app,
installed it and realised that it relies on MS fonts?

If people's OS blows up they need to submit a bug, but I can't see it
happening from installing fonts.
http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2002/06/mission_impossible_submitting.html

Michael Wheatland

Windows XP was around 600, then you need to install a font manager and yes
I've broken an XP install with too many fonts. I've had just shy of a
thousand in linux without any issues with the OS, Inkscape and the GIMP
occasionally have given problems which possibly could be tracked to having a
lot of fonts, but not definitively.

Cheers
GL

The Mac versions of LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 include DejaVu, Gentium, and Liberation fonts. LibreOffice also has Libertine and Biolinum fonts.

If we are going to have LibreOffice install fonts, then we should have the user approve it through the installation process.

The Liberation fonts were created to replace the MS fonts on Linux boxes. I believe that these are normally installed on Linux so it's less of an issue there. I am not sure if this would clash with the installer if there are different versions of the fonts. Devs would have to be involved obviously to make all of this work.

I don't think that MS would ever consider having the Liberation fonts appear on their installs.

Marc

After spending 5-10 minutes searching the Internet for Windows font limits,
I was not able to find anything other than some older forum posts. I was
hoping to find something from Microsoft's website. If there were a limit to
the number of fonts that can be installed on a Windows XP or newer machine,
I'm sure something would've been listed in the search results. The only
Windows versions with font limitations were Windows NT/9x/ME, and I don't
think many people are running those still.

I agree with Michael--I'd like to see LibreOffice install a variety of open
source fonts.

There is an interesting article on about.com that states the following:

*How many fonts is too many?*
When you can no longer install more fonts you definitely have too many. As a general rule of thumb, you can expect to run into installation problems with 800-1000 or more installed fonts. In practice, you'll probably encounter system slowdowns with fewer fonts. There is no magic number. The maximum number of fonts will vary from system to system due to the way the Windows System Registry works.

There is a Registry Key within Windows (for Win9x and WinME versions) that contains the names of all the TrueType fonts installed and the paths to those fonts. This Registry Key has a size limit. When that limit is reached, you can no longer install more fonts. If all your fonts have very short names you can install more fonts than if they all had very long names.

But "too many" is more than just a limitation of the operating system. Do you really want to scroll through a list of 700 or even 500 fonts from within your software applications? For best performance and ease of use, you'd do well to limit installed fonts to fewer than 500, perhaps as few as 200 if you're using a font manager as described below.

http://desktoppub.about.com/od/fonttechnologies/f/toomanyfontswin.htm

Besides the registry limitation, you have to consider memory limits as well. 600 or more may cause slow performance for a users pc. But I agree that installing a few fonts is a good idea. I have just over 200 fonts on my system and I've had OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice and Microsoft Office installed. I'd be interested to see which fonts are installed with the current LibreOffice installation. Anyone know? I think installing 10 or so fonts with LibO would be a good number.

Ron

So I believe that with confirmation that you can install 200+ fonts
without problems, we could include 20 or so fonts with the LibreOffice
distribution.

When an OS blows up because of too many fonts, the effect is the same as if the OS had been hit by a virus.

This is possible?

I had to reinstall Win7 on my laptop, because I installed too many
fonts. (Literally, the only way to fix Windows was to wipe the drive,
and reinstall it.)

I do have several hundred of fonts, really, and I never had problems with it.

Whilst Win7 can handle more fonts than other versions of Windows, it is
very picky about those fonts.

The only figure that sticks in my mind, is 50K installed fonts for some
Linux distros, but majority can handle 100+K installed fonts.

jonathon

Yes, it works fine with 200+. 20 or so would be great. From what I read, some open source fonts are installed with a LibO installation. We may have to ask the programmers which ones.

BTW ... There have been on occasions where I have found that some files that I have helped with correcting font problems that the only solution was to install the Arial font. The files in question came from a friend of mine who does a lot of church community music work and receives files from all over the country. These file were on the whole either Impress or long convoluted write files first worked on Win machines. The formatting of the file was a mess even after I made sure that the compatible Liberation font was set to replace the Ariel font. It just didn't format correctly. After going over the file with various tries, I returned the original file and installed the public domain Arial font and the text realigned properly. For this person in particular, I now make sure that the public domain Arial font is always installed on her Linux box. In fact, I also do this for another contact who is also in the music field as composer and he had the same peculiar problems as well ... Linux box as well. All of my other linux contacts have never shown any indications of any such problems. I tried to find an example, but it looks like I've deleted them all.

I help manage approx. 40 Mandriva boxes in my local area.

Years ago, this also happened to me on both Win and Linux boxes as a test. Grant you, I was on Win98. The fix was to boot into a Linux Cd and remove the newly added fonts. The problem on Linux is that I had added a .zip file of 1000 or so fonts and it looks like one of the fonts was one of the culprits. I removed the fonts one by one and finally gave up for lack of time and remove the whole set and the Linux box re-booted fine.

Marc

I had over 10,000 on my XP box and never had a problem

Hi all,

By the way, What is the font used when the user has disabled the
option "Use system font in the user interface"?

That font is a little blurry when LibO is installed on Windows
machines, so the use of another font or the LibO branding font could
be interesting to try.

Regards.

It's not illegal (albeit discouraged, see below) to install proprietary
components on a free system. If I recall correctly, Microsoft fonts
packages for Linux-based systems are based on an old font package that
Microsoft distributed with liberal (not free as in freedom, but liberal
enough to allow legal installation on a Linux-based system) terms of
use. Microsoft then restricted the license of their freely available
font packages and made this "port" impossible, but the old liberal
package can still be used.

Then, as Graham noticed, there would be philosophical problems too of
course, so the mere fact that it's not illegal to use Microsoft fonts is
not enough to settle on them.

Regards,
  Andrea.

I've made a few changes based on Michael's mockup and would like to know what you think. The file is Document template 0.3 and is posted here:
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Produce

You will need the Liberation Sans Regular, Linux Libertine G Regular, Linux Biolinum G Regular and Linux Biolinum G Italic fonts to view it correctly. I've also added some proposals for the information boxes and would like to know your thoughts on those as well.

Ron