font question -- liberation sans in libre office

[snowguy]

I was working on my resume in libre office and I have been using liberation sans as the font. I think is the default. Normally I don't sweat details like kerning, but I was really surprised how bad it looked. I noticed though that when I exported to PDF the kerning looked decent again. also if I blow it up really big in LibreOffice, it looks ok there. But at a normal size my letters in this case were touching. Any idea what causes this? I can always switch fonts but am hoping to learn what is going on vs just trying random stuff until it looks good enough to live with.

thanks in advance for any help.

This is a small screenshot of the libreOfficer version--notice how the r runs into the n.



This is a small screenshot of the pdf version showing in evince--notice that though the kerning isn't that pretty at least it isn't as bad as it is in libre office.

[snowguy]

bump

[ofnuts]

bump

Mostly a question of rendering IMHO. Maybe LO isn't using the right flags (anti-aliasing?). I have no such problem on my OpenOffice (that predates your LO...), but I have see it happen in other apps.

Btw, IIRC Liberation is designed to have exactly the same metrics as Arial, so they can be replaced by each other without any impact on layout.

[snowguy]

Thanks for the reply ofnuts. It sounds like if I went back to OO this would possibly be fixed. I'm not sure though where the problem is and whether maybe the trick is that you are using a different version of Ubuntu. I am using 11.10.

FWIW for anyone who comes across this, I haven't been able to solve this problem. In some sense it is a minor problem, but in another sense this is at the heart of what one does with a word processor--may words look good on a page.

One thing that I have typically liked about using ubuntu is that it has encouraged me to understand a bit about what is going on underneath the hood and how to fix a problem.

Unfortunately, in this case I don't understand why things aren't working right nor how I would go about fixing it Oh well.