Into.the.Void.

Lately my openoffice installation suffered from severe crashes. Anytime I wanted to pick a font from the drop down menu it crashed. It didn’t matter if it was oowriter2 or oocalc2 or whatever, it just crashed. I dedided that today was the day to fix this, so I started checking how OpenOffice reads the fonts of the system and created its font menu.

My first thought was that it read the fonts from my xorf.conf. So I started messing up with those. I ended up by cleaning some fontpaths I did not use any more but that was no fix for OpenOffice. Then it was time to start cleaning up the fontpaths that I had kept. My /usr/share/fonts/TTF/ dir was kinda large…so I started moving fonts from that dir to another named /usr/share/fonts/TTF-old/ and tried to keep inside /usr/share/fonts/TTF/ only the fonts I thought were good enough to keep. After a few X server restarts…the problem was gone. No more crashes.

But there was something weird going on at the same time. My xorg.conf only included the /usr/share/fonts/TTF/ fontpath and not /usr/share/fonts/TTF-old/, still though some fonts from /usr/share/fonts/TTF-old/ appeared inside the ooffice2 font drop-down menu. I started searching around and found that /etc/fonts/fonts.conf included the whole /usr/share/fonts/ path. That meant that many applications read the fonts from /usr/share/fonts/TTF-old/ too!
I removed /usr/share/fonts/ path from fonts.conf and replaced it with the fontpaths I use in xorg.conf too.

The result ? Everything works smoothly now. I can even see (or imagine) a small perfomance gain in some applications now that I don’t have that many fonts loaded.

Filed by kargig at 19:17 under Linux
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