Navaho Gunleg

…and after it seemed that it kept happening after installing the latest 2.0.2-version, I had to look further.

The stupid thing was — if I logged into my gf’s machine (the machine having issues), and set the DISPLAY variable to point to my own X-server — nothing bad happened, no matter what font I selected! Weird, huh?!

So it had to be something with the Xserver, I thought, eliminating other possibilities as I went along.

I compared her Xorg.conf with mine, but the changes were to no avail.

As a last resort, I went through the major PITA process of moving all the fonts out of X11’s font-directory, and moving them back (in groups) until OpenOffice crashed again (as suggested here). This basically broke down to doing this:

for I in a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z;
do
   cp ../bak/$I*.ttf . ; \
       mkfontdir ; mkfontscale ; fc-cache . ; sync ; \
       /opt/openoffice.org2.0/programs/soffice -writer
done;

If life only was that beautiful: I was logged in via my own machine, doing the copying process, and the gf was starting OpenOffice everytime. I only just now thought of that script.

Anyway, everytime OpenOffice started, the new added fonts were selected until the application crashed. This irritating iterative process, taking longer than I expected, finally found that the fonts giving the problems were the ones named mtproxy1.ttf to mtproxy9.ttf. (I didn’t really bother to figure out which one exactly caused the problem — it could be just one messed up file.)

Bleh — so plenty time wasted, but this information may be useful to someone having a similar problem, with similar messed-up TrueType font-files.

OpenOffice, Crash, Fonts, Slackware