<Solved>
Ok, well, here I am - posting the *Tiny font in OpenOffice Dialog Boxes* issue SOLUTION - at least
for my older copy ( I am running OpenOffice 2.4, which came default installed with my Fedora 9 Linux and
Gnome desktop).
On OpenOffice 2.4, the Tools option on the top menu bar is selected, and the last selection "Options" is
clicked, to get the unreadable dialog box of config options. Try to see if you can decode the leftside vertical
menubar box. The default highlighted bar is "User Data" on my version. Pressing "down-arrow" 4 times on your
keyboard , once you have the "OpenOffice.org" plusbox menu option expanded, will get you to the "View"
panel - which is labelled "Options - OpenOffice.org - View" in the window topline.
The topleft featurebox in this View config window is the "User Interface" sub-window. There is a nanomolecule
sized box labelled "Scaling" that you need to upclick from its default of "100%" to "130%". That will make the fonts
bigger - on the dialog boxes AND the windows. On my Gnome desktop, the window cells are now pretty
big - each cell is over one inch in length, the OpenOffice screen label fonts now look not too good - but the
fonts inside the cells look real nice (perhaps they are "Liberation Sans", as the topline dialogbox says?)
Oh, and I'm pretty sure you need to close OpenOffice and restart it before the upscaled fonts will appear
in the dialog boxes.
This fix worked very good for me.
There seems to be a disconnect between OpenOffice fonts, and SystemFonts. I don't now how this
works yet, but if you mess about, at least in Gnome/Fedora/OpenOffice you can find a nice match.
Once you get the scaling adjusted, and close and restart OpenOffice, and try to get a font that
comes close to what you had on your Excel/Windows sheets. All my old Excel 97 fonts are Arial, size 10,
and they look really *awful* when first loaded, since an MS TrueType font does not seem to be available.
You get this nasty, low-res default. But it is easy to fix.
I've found that selecting (via a control-A to "select the whole sheet"), and then a switch to
OpenOffice font Utopia (size 11), or DejaVu Sans 11, seem to work good. (I get a proper high-res
system font which lines up pretty close to what my Arial was in my various financial spreadsheets)
All in all, I am damned impressed with this OpenOffice thing. It pulled in a big MS-Excel-97 financial
spreadsheet, and with the Options / View / Scaling set to 130%, and a simple Control-A (select all)
to the sheet to change the font to "DejaVu Sans - size 11), I get a *very* workable spreadsheet.
Oh - YES - one more critical feature I discovered. I found it *critical* to set the "View/Zoom scaling"
from its system default of 80%, to 100% (ie. no scaling, I would assume) That way, a standard
MS-Excel sheet with Arial size 10 font can be loaded directly, and used with a "DejaVu Sans" size
11 pretty much without any fiddling. Note, this is the "Zoom..." factor scaling set by selecting
the top menubar View option, and then mousing down to the bottom of the drop down box, where
you see the word "Zoom". This has *no* effect on the dialog box issue, just the spreadsheet.
Setting zoom factor to 100% gives me a real nice, normal high-res font, which is very close to
Arial Truetype.
Ah, and one other item. For older, slower machines, where you are working with pre-built
older MS-Excel spreadsheets, just turn off all the Spell Checking features, by tweaking the
[ Tools/Options/Language Settings/Writing Aids ] panel, and turning off all spell checking. You get
much snappier spreadsheet operation. This assumes, of course, you know how to spell...
Hope this is useful.
- Rus