Arch Linux

Nahuel

Member

Registered: 2009-07-05

Posts: 10

AbiWord issues

Hello everyone. I recently installed Arch and I'm already starting to love it.
I wanted to install a program that can read Ms Word documents. AbiWord seemed to be the best option.
However, I can't get it to work right. This image explains better what my problem is:

http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/5447 … 0x768s.png

I installed it with pacman along with all the plugins available. 

I have Xfce4, if that helps.

If I can't get it fixed, what other choices do I have other than OpenOffice? I have antiword, but I want something more like AbiWord.

Thanks.

zombie_monkey

Member

Registered: 2008-02-06

Posts: 10

Re: AbiWord issues

This is an old thread, but I have always had the same problem with abiword on many distros. It was rare for abiword to manage to display a document not created with it. I tried opening some documents in it again today and it was not as bad as the screenshot you supply, which is how they usually look to me too. It actually displayed them mostly intellegibly when I started clicking on the text and then deselecting it a word at a time. I checked the Arch wiki and it was suggested that you install ttf-freefont ttf-ms-fonts, and it actually displayed the documents! I checked with some old ones that look like your screenshot and, it was a miracle, it displayed them! I had assumed that the rare documents I handle just contain crappy obfuscated non-documented MS internal markup, generated by long-dead versions of MS Word many years ago.

TL;DR: try #pacman -S ttf-freefont ttf-ms-fonts

EDIT: keep in mind Firefox will use those fonts now, and it looks like crap ( I think the ms ones do, maybe I'll try how it works with only freefont, it's rare I have to handle such files anyway, and other programs don't have this problem so...) You could uncheck "allow pages to use their own fonts". But this could intefere with this wonderful new web font thing.

Last edited by zombie_monkey (2009-10-24 16:12:33)

Nahuel

Member

Registered: 2009-07-05

Posts: 10

Re: AbiWord issues

Thanks a lot for your answer. I noticed that the documents that looked the worst were the ones with the Times New Roman font. So, I thought that the problem could be that I don't have that font installed. What I did was copy some popular TTF fonts from C:\Windows\fonts to /usr/share/fonts/ttf. And, miraculously, the problem was solved.

Your solution is way better, though. Will try that as well. Thanks.

tjwoosta

Member

Registered: 2008-12-18

Posts: 453

Re: AbiWord issues

Although liberation fonts are great, only the ttf-ms-fonts are required to fix the abiword issue.