RE: [libreoffice-users] ”Artifacts” in OpenOffice and LibreOffice

I see less-dramatic variants of these on Windows 8 also, using an ATI Radeon HD 5980 graphics 
processor with an HP Z30W monitor in 32bbp 2560 x 1600 landscape orientation.

I am certain in my case that the situation is GDI/driver/engine related.  The typical situation is 
where editing leads to modified text appearing off-baseline and interfering with adjacent text, 
usually in the line above.  Since causing the displayed material to refresh corrects things (e.g., 
by performing a Page Down followed by a Page Up), the situation is somewhere in the rendering path.

I am not so certain that the situation is unique to OpenOffice-lineage programs.  That may just 
reflect where we are working so much.  It could be attributable to heavy usage of fine-detail font 
rendering in these programs bringing out the defects.  There might also be associated computational 
errors (somewhere in the code base and libraries used) in how changes in documents are first 
rendered in the GUI.

It is also necessary to consider that different users observe similar defects with different 
causes.  It does seem that it is all about rendering in the GUI, not something untoward happening 
to the document itself (internal to the program or when made persistent).

The challenge is having tests that can reveal these situations and support isolation of causes.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Douglas Pitonyak [mailto:andrew@pitonyak.org] 
Sent: Saturday, May 11, 2013 07:08
To: Johnny Rosenberg
Cc: users@openoffice.apache.org; LibreOffice Användare
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] ”Artifacts” in OpenOffice and LibreOffice


I have had subtle redraw issues with OO off and on, and I always blamed 
it on an interaction between applications and the video drivers. Realize 
that I use nVidia video cards on 64-bit Fedora using the proprietary 
video drivers. What I saw was not remotely as bad. Admittedly, when I 
tried out the latest dev build, it was totally unusable (of course, the 
single tester was unable to reproduce on Windows 7).

see https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=122214

Are you able to do a test and change your video driver say between the 
free and not free driver to see if there is a change (I do not use 
Ubuntu so I don't have a good handle on what drivers are available or how).

I used to have exactly the same problem in QT, and it was very bad. I 
was able to avoid the problem with QT Creator by starting it using

-graphicssystem raster

Not that I expect this to help you. I did notice that it still has some 
rendering issues that appeared in the latest versions (I believe it is 
related to an over-lay issue when you edit a field.... that assumption 
allowed me to fix it in the software that I write, but I did not jump 
into the QT code base).

I have seen strange redraw issues so long in OO that correcting for it 
is almost automatic in my brain (scroll screen up then down to clear) so 
I cannot even say if I still see the problem. I think I do, but it is 
for sure not as bad is it used to be for me.

I know, that I have rambled on and on.... I will summarize in saying

1. I have never seen it so bad
2. I have seen screen corruption
3. You may avoid some of it based on the video driver

If I had it that bad on my Fedora system, I would likely change my 
desktop on login to see if it helped. With Fedora, I can easily jump 
between Gnome and KDE (as one example). I would also try jumping between 
the two different drivers available to see how that helped as well. 
Sadly, the "free" driver is poor with respect to 3D stuff.


On 05/11/2013 08:52 AM, Johnny Rosenberg wrote:
> I have had this problem for quite some time now (months if not years)
> in LibreOffice and OpenOffice. The problems are maybe a little bit
> worse in LibreOffice, but I didn't exactly measure it…
>
> It looks like a graphics card problem, but why are nothing else
> affected? It only happens to OpenOffice and LibreOffice. I tested a
> few versions and it seems to not matter. The screenshots are taken
> with Apache OpenOffice 3.4.1 and I saw the same thing in LibreOffice
> 3.5, 3.6 and 4.0. I think this also happened with earlier LibreOffice
> versions, like 3.4 and 3.3. I didn't use OpenOffice since 3.2 (except
> 3.4.1, which I use these days), and I don't even remember what it
> looked like.
>
> Here's a screenshot with Apache OpenOffice Calc 3.4.1. I added some
> arrows pointing at the problem areas:
> http://ubuntuone.com/0wvqcaN38PC5835t4uJVPv
>
> The worst thing is when I try to use the Basic IDE, take a look at
> this. Very hard to write and edit code when it looks like this:
> http://ubuntuone.com/4HRPQMpblZT97UxHq5ggzO
>
> My operating system is Ubuntu 12.04 and the more stuff I run at the
> same time, the worse will it look.
>
> My graphics card is the nVidia GeForce Go 7300, which is blacklisted
> for use with the Unity 3D desktop, so that may be what's causing this
> problem, but still it ONLY happens to LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
>
> One thought that I have is that LibreOffice and OpenOffice are not GTK
> applications (I think – are they?), but on the other hand, neither is
> my web browser (Opera), and I don't have these problems with it.
>
> Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org were installed with the official
> deb files. The LibreOffice version that came with Ubuntu 12.04 was
> carefully removed before installing what I have now.
>
> Thoughts? Anyone else saw this?
>
> Packard Bell Easy Note MX66 laptop, made in November 2006.
> 2.0 GiB RAM, Genuine Intel® CPU T2050 @ 1.60GHz × 2.
>
> Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (32 bits)
> Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-41-generic-pae
>
> nVIDIA Driver Version: 304.88

-- 
Andrew Pitonyak
My Macro Document: http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt
Info:  http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php


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