During the week I discovered an interesting issue around the kerning n#464436 and i#26519. After some time spent with Florian and Thorsten, we finally found what was going wrong. Here is a summary of the problem:

  • If you have a non-printable character between two letters, no kerning is applied to those characters on linux.
  • If you have one of the two characters with a different attribute (eg, font color), the kerning isn't applied to those characters as well on linux.

Here are some screenshot visually explaining the problem and showing the fix. On those screenshots, the problems are happenning between the A and V.

The non fixed versions:

Formatting without the kerning

Formatting without the kerning

Non printable character without kerning

Non printable character without kerning

The fixed versions:

Formatting with fixed kerning

Formatting with fixed kerning

Non printable character with kerning fixed

Non printable character with kerning fixed

The patch is attached at the upstream issue and available in go-oo git repo at:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/ooo-build/ooo-build/tree/patches/dev300/vcl-kerning-fix.diff