Real font smoothing in OpenOffice

Jul 21, '04 09:31:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

If you use OpenOffice, then you will have noticed that fonts look bad -- not nearly as nice as they do in OS X apps. The following hint will solve that. It assumes that you have installed OpenOffice 1.1.2. Credits go to Marc Liyanage for the how-to, as well as the compiled freetype library.

Read the rest of the hint for the solution...

  1. Copy the text below, and paste it into TextEdit, then save the file as OOfreetype.sh in your home directory.
    #!/bin/sh
    set -e
    
    echo Creating folder libfreetype in /Users/Shared
    cd /Users/Shared
    mkdir libfreetype
    cd libfreetype
    
    echo Downloading replacement library...
    curl -O 'http://www2.entropy.ch/download/libfreetype-6.3.3-entropy.tar.gz'
    
    echo Unpacking library...
    tar xzf libfreetype-6.3.3-entropy.tar.gz
    rm libfreetype-6.3.3-entropy.tar.gz
    chmod a+rX .
    
    echo Updating OpenOffice
    install_name_tool -change /usr/X11R6/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib 
      /Users/Shared/libfreetype/libfreetype.6.dylib 
      /Applications/OpenOffice.org1.1.2/program/libvcl645mxp.dylib
    echo Done.
    
  2. Open Terminal, and type the following:
    % sudo sh ~/OOfreetype.sh
    
    If you see no error messages, and the message Done. at the end, then all worked fine.
The problem is that the Freetype library, which X11 apps use to do font smoothing, is far from perfect. Marc Liyanage described a solution. See his website for a description of the issue and his posting on the Apple Discussion Forums.

Uninstall: If you want to undo the change, open a Terminal window and type:

% sudo install_name_tool -change /Users/Shared/libfreetype/libfreetype.6.dylib \
  /usr/X11R6/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib \
  /Applications/OpenOffice.org1.1.2/program/libvcl645mxp.dylib
You can type this on one single line, but then you'll have to omit the backslashes.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040715064137204