Re: [office] OpenDocument TC coordination call minutes 2007-11-05

["Peter Vandenabeele" <peter@vandenabeele.com>]

On Nov 7, 2007 2:26 PM, Lars Oppermann <Lars.Oppermann@sun.com> wrote:
> ** default values
> collection of properties posted
> what should be the values?
> implementors should extract defaults from their applications.
> ACTION: Ma Yue get defaults for Lotus Symphony
> ACTION: David get defaults for KOffice
> ACTION: Oliver get defaults for OpenOffice
>
> There probably will be no defaults for fonts. Thus applications that want to me
> interoperable on visual representation must include font information. The
> font-declaration mechanism allows to include additional information about fonts
> (including a URL for outlines)

Sorry I missed the call. Could I still get a little more explanation
on this topic. My
concern is that the different (proprietary and free) fonts present on different
platforms are a major cause of "visually" different representations.
Particularly
in presentations (using e.g. Impress vs. PowerPoint), this effect can be very
annoying if bullets starts "falling off" the page.

Also, should someone get the "defaults" for MS Office and Google Docs ?

Also, are the defaults not more dependent on the Operating System (such as
Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, *BSD, ...) than on the Office
suit. If I am
not mistaken, at least in Linux, the fonts are supplied under the X system
(and not by the Office apps). I presume similar behaviour on OpenSolaris
and *BSD (would that be Mac OS X too ?). I have less experience in how
fonts are managed on Windows. E.g. I have the visual impression OO.o
interop between OO.o on a Windows and OO.o on a Linux can see problems
due to fonts, that are present on one OS and not on the other one and vice
versa.

What is the relevance of the recently released free Liberation fonts by Redhat?

  https://www.redhat.com/promo/fonts/

Could that be used as a "universal fall-back default" that at least could be
made to work on all platforms, allowing the free fonts to be refered to
(or theoretically even included, as in PDF/A) in all documents. That might
be a nice advancement of practical interop, if you could know for sure that
all platforms could (technically and legally) use the exact same base font
set.

I hope this is not totally redundant to the actual phone discussion that I did
not attend (sorry if so).

Thanks,

Peter Vandenabeele
http://www.vandenabeele.com/