AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Issues with installing under all GNU/Linux Distributions
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acknak
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AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by acknak »

All versions of AOO up to 4.1.2 worked fine on my system, under Fedora 21.

When I upgraded Fedora to the 23 release, all AOO versions will not use the native Gnome UI elements but instead fall back to (what I assume is) a GUI toolkit bundled with AOO. It works well enough except for two things: the UI elements are uncomfortably small and hard to see/read, and AOO seems to crash a lot more (I'm guessing this has to do with the GUI toolkit, as AOO has been very stable for me before this).

Does anyone have any idea how I might go about trying to debug this? I've not asked the Fedora people since they support LibO and that works just fine.

BTW: It's not a profile issue (first thing I tried).
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by RoryOF »

Have you tried the old trick of starting OO from a terminal to observe any error messages? In a terminal type "openoffice4" (no quotes).
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by acknak »

Good idea. Unfortunately, no messages.
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by RoryOF »

I found this, but I am now beyond my knowledge - I only used a version of Fedora very briefly some years ago, on my path to choosing Xubuntu.
https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/questi ... fedora-23/
 Edit: added URL 
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by acknak »

Interesting. Thanks for looking.

Is there somewhere else I should ask? Are there developer-types on the Apache mailing list? Which would be best?
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by RoryOF »

I'm brooding on your question. What is missing? It may be possible to hand install it.

The quick glance I had at Fedora 23 comments didn''t impress me.
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

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I haven't tried tracing system calls. I've tried that before and found it like looking for a needle in a haystack but it might give me a clue as to what it's looking for.

I guess I was hoping to find someone who can tell me what it means when OO switches to this other UI. It could be a simple configuration problem. But I don't know where/who to ask.
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by RoryOF »

I found this
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ApacheOpenOffice

The author is a major developer of OO, so you might contact him.

PM me if necessary
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by acknak »

Good idea!

I finally thought to check if anyone else has reported it, but nothing in the Apache or Fedora bugzillas.

Tried installing a snapshot build from May 2; no better. Maybe I should try a 4.2 dev build.
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by acknak »

PS: I forgot to mention ...

I noticed this odd thing: if I start a new text document and insert a comment, the font box in the formatting toobar shows this (verbaitm, copy/paste):
Andale Sans UI;Arial Unicode MS;Lucida Sans Unicode;Tahoma;DejaVu Sans;Albany AMT;Albany;Arial;Nimbus Sans L;Bitstream Vera Sans;Interface User;WarpSans;Geneva;Tahoma;MS Sans Serif;Helv;Dialog;Lucida;Helvetica;Charcoal;Chicago;Helmet;Interface System;Sans Serif
Which doesn't look like a setting that OO would include, that maybe OO is getting a font spec from the system that it doesn't understand, and that throws off the whole UI configuration.
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by RoryOF »

In OO, a normal comment seems to allow exactly all the fonts that are available to a document.
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by acknak »

That makes sense, but a) that's a tiny subset of the hundreds of fonts that appear in the OO font selector, and I don't see a pattern to what's there. And b) OO Writer doesn't support a font setting like that. At least when I've tried to use something like font1;font2, I just end up with a generic substituted font.

What do other people see as the comment font? Libreoffice just shows the same (default) font as in the main document window, but I'm not sure how comparable LibO and AOO are at this point.
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

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I've just made a very quick test. In a document using Times New Roman and Georgia, an inserted comment uses DejaVu Sans.
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by RoryOF »

An outside chance: have you rebuilt the font cache? In Debian based systems this is done by

Code: Select all

sudo fc-cache -f -v
The command line should be the same; change only the superuser invocation to suit Fedora.
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by acknak »

Ooh, good idea!

There were some old (two years) files in the cache, but removing them and rebuilding (fc-cache -r) hasn't changed anything. Restarted the desktop just to be sure.

I guess my idea about the font list coming from the system isn't right: at least some of the font names there are not present anywhere on the system, nor are thy mentioned in the font server config files.
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by RoryOF »

I was thinking of a problem that has been reported on Forum on Macs, which are using a linux derived system. That problem is cured by rebuilding the font cache.
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Re: AOO won't use native GUI elements on Fedora 23

Post by acknak »

Just for the record, as RoryOF suggested, here:
http://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/vi ... 13#p388213

I tried the env variables, like so:
SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk /path/to/soffice
SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk3 /path/to/soffice
OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=gnome SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk /path/to/soffice

No effect.
AOO4/LO5 • Linux • Fedora 23
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