LibreOffice Branding and Documentation

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

I noticed that the template used dozens? of empty paragraphs (Default or Text body paragraph style) for interparagraph spacing instead of using the vertical (before and after) spacing that the paragraph styles themselves afford. Was that done intentionally or was that how my copy reads, as I originally experienced some difficulty in downloading the template?

One means would be to introduce specialized paragraph styles (as needed...) with the desired interparagraph spacings already preinstalled.

Gary

It's how it was created. That's a good point for the final docs, but I just meant this as a mockup for the overall feel of it.

Well, yes. Office 2007, if I remember correctly, installed the Cambria/Calibri/Candara/Consolas range of fonts on Windows XP, which on release lacked the fonts. I think this was mainly because with Vista being released, a bunch of people would be sending out documents made in Calibri/etc, which those receiving on XP would not be able to view correctly. However, we might get this issue - people sending out Liberation Sans or Droid Sans-filled documents, with the receivers wondering why the document doesn't look right. Then again, if you're sending out documents where formatting is key, then you would use PDF, which embeds the fonts...?

I think, if you distributed ~20 or so fonts, it would be no big deal for space or for hitting that font limit. It could only be a benefit in the end users mind, especially if you add in the Droid fonts (which imo look the best), as it's a new set of fonts to play around with. Maybe we even might be responsible for making Impact or Comic Sans MS usage decline... :wink:

- Damien Ellis

Microsoft launched Office 2007 and Vista simultaneously via numerous road shows in the winter of 2006/2007, so their new "C" fonts were used for both Vista and Office 2007. Because I had signed up for betatesting various MS releases, I received an email inviting me to attend a road show a couple weeks after the North American International Auto Show wrapped up their 15-day show some four-mile bus ride away. As a reward for attending the morning seminars (there were two free meals and afternoon seminars, too...), I would receive a gratis full version of Office 2007 Professional and Vista Ultimate, plus numerous other software packages. So, I went that cold February day...

Office 2007 uses two "C" fonts for its new defaults: Calibri (sans serif) for text body and Cambria (serif) for headings (chosen for Web documents, not print docs).

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.

Sure would be nice if LibreOffice installed those fonts automatically. :slight_smile:

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.

Woops--I meant to ask this in my previous email. I downloaded Linux
Libertine fonts 4.7.5-2 and I don't see any fonts with those names. Did I
download the right fonts? And where would I find the Droid fonts? I saw a
site with information on them, but couldn't find any download links.

I just noticed something interesting...

I installed the ttf-linux-libertine package on Ubuntu. Now OOo is
showing that I've got available Linux Libertine O (but not G) and Linux
Biolinum O (but not G), and LibO is showing both O and G for both fonts.
I forgot to check what was showing in LibO before I did the
installation.

--Jean

Droid fonts
http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/frameworks/base.git;a=tree;f=data/fonts;hb=HEAD

Libertine
These are the ones I used:
http://www.numbertext.org/linux/

It looks like there are two versions of the Libertine fonts. I installed the G graphite versions. The originals are available here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxlibertine/

Ron,
I really like the Format 2 infoboxes and the toned down headings.
Also I think I just fell in love with the Biolinum G font. This is a
beautiful yet professional looking title.

Great work.

Roger that... However, it only takes a minute or so to create a custom paragraph or character style, so it is a good practice to always include them in any template and not employ a series of empty paragraphs for spacing purposes. The custom styles do not need to set up with their parameters initially--just give the styles appropriate, useful names to serve as arrows in your quiver to use when needed.

If you intend to use subdocuments in a master document, you might want to take care not to use a generic term for a paragraph style, say Title, in all the docs because an automatic generation of a ToC would treat all such styles with that term the same--usually not what you want. To get around that, you might want to include custom styles named Book title, Chapter title, Front-matter title, etc.

Anyway, it is a good habit to start with some custom styles (as needed) right from the start when designing any template.

For practice, every so often I might take an OOo template, make some changes to it, then save it as a DOC file and import that DOC file into Adobe FrameMaker and see how that goes--usually (hopefully) pretty straightforward and flawless. FrameMaker is a much better medium for bookmaking in that crossrefs between external subdocuments are much easier to effect and thus are more reliable. Besides, FrameMaker is a hybrid word processor/DTP app that has better typesetting algorithms than a fancy word processor. (Adobe InDesign is even better yet). But that is my personal preference as to building books (master docs) for PDFs or print.

Also, MS Word makes beautiful tables with ease. So converting them afterward to another medium like OOo or FrameMaker can take advantage of that Word feature. You could create a series of custom tables in Word and collect them and convert them for later use in OOo or FrameMaker--provided that you do not mind using packages developed by private companies. Some people have hangups about using a proprietary software package or O/S.