Optimizing KOffice and Your System

KOffice: A General Introduction
Prev |  | Next

# Chapter 6. Optimizing KOffice and Your System

While KOffice should work quite nice out of the box, there may well be some things to optimize to get the best out of KOffice. This chapter shows you what you might want to do to achieve the best results with your new office suite.

# 6.1. Optimizing Font Output

Fonts are a difficult topic on X Windows. In this section we'll cover some problems that are frequently reported by people using KOffice. Some problems are not just KOffices fault, but depend on your system configuration, which is why you may need to modify system configuration files in order to solve them. If you don't have access to the root account on your system, please ask your system operator about this and point him or her to this manual. As the topic of fonts is too complex to cover all of it here, you may want to consult the Font HOWTO from which I've taken the following information. You will find more details there.

## 6.1.1. How to Get Nicely Scaled Fonts on Screen

STUFF

## 6.1.2. How to Get Correct Printout

While KOffice automatically can handle all X11 fonts on screen, printout can pose a problem: on most systems, printing is done via ghostscript. Now, while KOffice knows the font names used by X Windows, it does normally not know the font names used by ghostscript. KOffice tries to guess these names, which unfortunately doesn't work all of the time.

This problem can be solved, although this is not that easy. Actually, maybe you are using a distribution which has done most work for you already (so if you have no reason to complain about printout you can skip this section). What you have to do is to tell ghostscript how to translate the (guessed) font names KOffice uses to its own font names. This can be done by adding lines to a file called `Fontmap`. An alias line in `Fontmap` looks like the following example:

Example 6-1. An alias in the ghostscript Fontmap

     	/Algerian-Roman /Algerian       ;

Please note that a space before the ';' is mandatory. In this example, Algerian-Roman is the name KOffice uses for Algerian. You'll have to add such lines for the fonts KOffice doesn't display correctly. To make this task easier, Donovan Rebbechi has written a perl script you can find at http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/font_howto/kwdfont. Assuming that you have a fontfile `/usr/share/ghostscript/fonts/fontfile.ttf` you'll enter

     kwdfont /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts/fontfile.ttf

to get the appropriate aliases. The script should mork in most cases. As mentioned, you should have a look at the Font HOWTO for more accurate and in-depth information.

Prev | Home | Next
Using KParts in your document |  | Customizing the KOffice GUI