OpenOffice 3.0 on My Mac-- Now Reverting to 2.4

I finally got around to installing the new OpenOffice 3.0 on my MacBook Pro. The big feature I’ve been waiting for, of course, is that OpenOffice 3 now uses the native Mac GUI. Prior versions only used X11, and Apple’s X11 server kinda sucks. So using OpenOffice 2.4 is a less than optimal experience.

The first thing I did upon installing OpenOffice 3 is to open up my current manuscript. Now, when I write, I use a formatted document, as though I were typing words directly onto the laid-out book pages. This saves time in layout, because the book comes already laid out correctly. (However, I use style sheets, so that I can make changes to the layout, if need be, cheaply and efficiently.)

So the first thing I noticed is that the formatting of my book was all screwed up.

OOo3 found all the correct fonts, but they were all misrendered in one way or another. The primary headline font (CopperplateBold) seemed to render shorter than it should have; though that could have been my imagination, because the secondary headline font (CopperplateLight) rendered too big, with tight letter-spacing (I guess, to make up for the oversized letters). The main font (Palatino) also rendered way too big, and the letter-spacing of my italic text (PalatinoItalic) was way too tight. The drop caps looked like crap, because OOo3 inserted additional gaps above their ascenders and below their baselines–I have no idea why.

Now, I’m sure that if I were to hack with the style sheets, I could probably resolve most of these issues (although I don’t know how I would deal with misrendered drop-caps). I opted instead, for now, to keep using OpenOffice.org 2.4, at least for my current manuscript. I may experiment with it for other manuscripts, but I’m disappointed that the formatting turned out so much different simply by upgrading to a new version. I don’t remember having any significant issues upgrading previous versions of OpenOffice.org.

One possible cause for some of the formatting problems is that because OOo3 runs under the native Mac GUI, it uses the native Mac fonts and the Mac font renderer. (But my understanding is that it uses the old, now deprecated ATSUI API, instead of the new Core Text API.) OOo2/Mac runs under X11, and it uses a different font renderer. So one might expect the fonts to look different now. I just don’t want to have to stop my life in order to hack with the document in order to get it back to the correct proportions. On the other hand, you’d expect 11-point Palatino to look like 11-point Palatino, no matter what font system you were using. But on the other hand, I’ve long known and accepted that I can’t open up my OOo/Mac documents in OOo/Windows and expect them look the same, because the Windows fonts are all different. I guess I can accept that taking documents authored under X11 and opening them under Aqua will likewise cause them to look significantly different.

Regarding the drop-caps, I notice in the OOo bug list, there are numerous issues still outstanding. None of them appears to address the issue I’ve observed. Still, I may need to wait for version 3.1 before they work correctly. (I might get a chance to look into the issue I’m experiencing in more detail. If so, I’ll submit a bug report, if the issue has not already been addressed.)

-TimK