Caolan McNamara

Here’s a zoomed in view of the gedit File label which is rendered with cairo. . And here’s one of the same label as rendered by OOo currently.

After adding my experimental cairo text render patch, here’s the OOo one again. . Pretty neat.

Cairo makes it utterly trivial to support text rotation, scaling and artificial oblique. All pretty neat. On the other hand currently artificial emboldening is painful as you can only get it through the cairo_ft_font_face_create_for_pattern api and not my preferred cairo_ft_font_face_create_for_ft_face, so the code to do that is disabled and we fall back to the current rendering mechanism for emboldened fons. You can turn it on in today’s rawhide OOo with export SAL_ENABLE_CAIROTEXT=1. I haven’t done any extensive testing to see if all is ok with CJK text, but I don’t really expect any problems.

So I fixed a little Pixmap leak in OOo and afterwards wanted to see what the the remaining pixmaps might be. Stripping down this code to gave me a quick and dirty Pixmap browser that takes pixmap ids from stdin and then I stuffed a LD_PRELOAD lib in there to intercept OOo’s XCreatePixmap and XFreePixmap and fed the list of unfreed pixmaps to the browser and ta-da intsta-handy debugging tool. pixmaptracker and browser.

For some reason (crap translations ?, just prefer using English ?), it’s common for some non-english speakers to run their desktop with an en_US locale but then to have difficulties that stuff like openoffice.org, etc. defaults to letter size paper and inches for display units. So my modest suggestion is that if you want to use an English locale then a non en_US locale like e.g. en_GB will default to the way more common A4 paper format and also default to cm for units. Even better for most europeans, using en_IE will also give you A4, cm and additionally the default currency as Euro.