Font Size in Open Office Docs on different platforms

[Andy Campbell]

Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, Tim wrote:
>
>> Tim:
>>>> Are the lines the same widths?  Point sizing generally refers to
>>>> characters per inch across the page.
>>
>> Richard England:
>>> I don't believe that is true unless it has changed since my days in
>>> actual printing.  The character size in points refers to the size from
>>> the highest to the lowest extent of the letters of a given type face
>>> size.
>>
>> While the "size" of a font is, indeed, the entire size of the font,
>> points used in typing, generally, were just used as a measure of how
>> many would fit across a given width (10pt being the common one, 12pt
>> being the more compact, usually).
>
> A point is 1/72 of an inch, and typface sizes are measured vertically. 
> Ten-point type is smaller than 12-point type.
>
> Manual and electric typewriters of old usually came with one of two 
> fixed-width typefaces: Pica (10 chars per inch) and the more compact 
> Elite (12 cpi).  (High-school students liked Pica typewriters better 
> than Elite because fewer words were needed to fill up that five-page 
> essay.  Today's high-school students use the same trick.)  (Adding to 
> the confusion, a pica is a measure equal to 1/6 of an inch.)
>
> It doesn't make much sense with a variable-width font to talk about 
> measuring its size in terms of horizontal cpi.
>
>>
>>> You also have to consider the display medium. DPI and aspect ratio of
>>> the display device can wreak havoc on any document transfered across
>>> systems.
>>
>> Another consideration that word processor document files are just
>> storage of something on a particular PC (for later printing, etc.).
>> They really are not a portable document format.  A different PC might
>> have different fonts, and will probably have a different printer (with
>> different minimum margins).
>
> The problem of documents looking different on different systems is 
> indeed due to fonts, at least in large part.  The different fonts 
> usually differ in terms of appearance (of course) and in terms of 
> average width.  Modern printers usually have controllable margins and 
> one of a few standard dots-per-inch measures (and the information is 
> recorded in the drivers), so that's not so much of an issue.  (Old 
> daisy-wheel printers were another matter entirely.)  The issue is how 
> typefaces are translated from their vector descriptions to their pixel 
> representations.
>
> With screens, fonts are measured in points, but when they are drawn, 
> they are drawn using pixels.  The font-drawing systems need to know 
> the true number of pixels per inch (ppi) in order to get the point 
> size true.  If a system can't detect the ppi and the user doesn't set 
> it, then the font sizes on screens are likely to be (a) wrong and (b) 
> different from screen to screen--even when using the same software.
>

Ok.  so explain this ....

Everyone else at work uses StarOffice, I've just been using OpenOffice 
on my own machines as it get installed as standard on FC5.  I've just 
installed StarOffice on FC5, and with StarOffice the documents look and 
print the same as every one at work. So it appears to be the Office 
software and not OS/X related.

If I print the same document from OpenOffice and StarOffice and hold the 
pages on top of each other and up to a light I can see the gradual creep 
as one document goes out of sync with the other - but its very slight on 
a line by line basis.

Now I thought StarOffice and OpenOffice had the same code base ?  So I 
would expect the font rendering to be the same.

Andy