FS#2227 - OpenOffice.org segfaults if there are badly formed fonts in fontpath

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Glyn Adgie (glyn) - Friday, 18 February 2005, 11:27 GMT
Last edited by Dale Blount (dale) - Friday, 18 February 2005, 13:03 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To Tobias Powalowski (tpowa)
Architecture not specified
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 0.7 Wombat
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 0%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

OpenOffice.org will not start if there are certain fonts visible to fontconfig. When this happens, running soffice from the konsole command line does nothing, then terminates with a segfault.

The problem was first noticed when a large collection of Type1 fonts was enabled, by including the directory where they reside in /etc/fonts/local.conf. Removing the font directory in local.conf fixed the problem. It was still possible to make use of the fonts we need out of the collection by copying them to another directory, and telling fontconfig about this new directory. It was thought at the time that a few of the font files in the collection might be badly formed, but it was not practical to track this down.

The problem also occurred with some Type1 and bitmap fonts I designed myself, which I copied into my ~/.fonts to allow me to be preview them. These fonts were often incomplete in terms of the character set, and might have had other defects. If I removed these suspect fonts, and left only the completed ones, OpenOffice seemed to be happy.

This problem did not appear to affect any other applications.
This task depends upon

Closed by  Tobias Powalowski (tpowa)
Monday, 03 October 2005, 14:09 GMT
Reason for closing:  Won't implement
Comment by Tobias Powalowski (tpowa) - Saturday, 19 February 2005, 13:19 GMT
does this happen openoffice2, too?
the problem is that openoffice has it's own font engine, that could cause the trouble. But the packages are no source builds, so i don't see a chance to change that, somehow. remove the fonts that disturb or try the font installer provided by openoffice itself.
Comment by Glyn Adgie (glyn) - Tuesday, 22 February 2005, 11:54 GMT
Yes, openoffice2 has problems with the large font collection.

The problem appears to be limited to the initial setup, when openoffice is first started after installation or an upgrade. Once the setup has been completed, the suspect font directory can be enabled with no apparent problems.

I tried to replicate the setup problem by removing and reinstalling openoffice with pacman, and I removed the openoffice directory from my home directory. However, this did not seem to set things back to the just-installed state, so openoffice went into "repair" instead of "setup" mode.

I am going to try out getting back to the initial setup by creating a new user with a fresh home directory.

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