# How to get openoffice or libreoffice to display text properly



## carlton_draught (Mar 15, 2011)

I've been through a lot of frustration to fix this, and maybe this will help someone. I'm using twinview on a multimonitor, nvidia card setup.

The problem is that when you are looking at a dialog box, the text won't display until you mouseover it, or you select the checkbox or whatever item it pertains to. All you see is what looks like an underscore where the text should be. You can imagine that gets to be very frustrating, looking at mystery meat dialog box options.

This also seems to be the same bug that causes calc to not update the screen properly when you adjust the size of a row or column, unless you select over the columns that aren't updating, or refresh things somehow. I think the same bug makes it so that you can only see a cell you are editing in the actual cell, and not in the "Input line" up above, as you are also supposed to be able to do.

I just installed libreoffice hoping that it would solve it, but it has the same issue as openoffice.org.

The fix (riffing off a suggestion here) is to go to the view menu as he states, e.g. Tools / Options / OpenOffice.org / View. What fixes is it is to turn off "Screen font antialiasing". It's the second checkbox going down on the left. Enjoy the {antialiasing/being able to use your office suite like you are supposed to} trade-off.


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## carlton_draught (Mar 16, 2011)

Another option that works a little better (perhaps) is to keep "Screen font antialiasing" checked, but limit it to 14 pixels. That way the text in the dialog boxes display correctly, but you get antialiasing for your documents. I'll see how it goes in calc.

Tried various /etc/X11/xorg.conf manipulations to no effect.


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