Noob-Qs: StarOffice 8 menu fonts, xfterm4 with spaces in font name ...

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Bryan J. Smith schreef:
> Total XFCE noob here (running XFCE 4.2.3 on Fedora Core 5 x86-64 -- all
> Core/Extras RPMs loaded).  I'm used to using GNOME as a crutch, although
> I know how various .X* files work etc..., so my apologies for my
> ignorance in advance.  ;->

Those questions are anything but trivial, so don't worry about showing 
your ignorance just yet ;-)

> 
> I have 2 questions/issues ...
> 
> 1.  StarOffice 8 Update 3 menu/dialog fonts 
> 
> Under XFCE, the menu and dialog font Looks like the standard font I'd
> get under WINE -- small (8pt?) and ugly.  Running under GNOME has no
> issues.  I tried playing with the options for Fonts/View to no avail.
> I'm ignorant if it is a service that GNOME provides that StarOffice 8
> uses that doesn't launch under XFCE and/or if I need to add something
> under ~/.Xresources, etc...
> 
> Please advise.  Apologize for my ignorance in advance.

Stop apologizing, please ;)

I'm not sure about the latests openoffice and I don't know on what 
version staroffice is based, but older versions of openoffice used an 
ugly hack to determine if it was running in GNOME.

You could try adding the following lines to the appropriate startup file:

# fool OOo into thinking GNOME is running
# incredibly ugly hack
xprop -root -format GNOME_SM_PROXY 8i -set GNOME_SM_PROXY 1

> 
> I know, I know, I should probably see what happens if I load
> OpenOffice.org (from Fedora).  I'll try it and report back.
> 
> 2.  xfterm4 doesn't like spaces in font name
> 
> I like the Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font for my xterm.  E.g., to xterm,
> I can pass:  
>   xterm -fa "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono"
> 
> However, when I attempt to do so with xfterm4, it doesn't honor it:
>   xfterm4 -fa "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono"
> 
> I finally realized that it doesn't like spaces in the facename (-fa)
> option, because I pass something like Courier (no spaces), it works:
>   xfterm4 -fa "Courier"
> 
> It sounds like the xfterm4 application, which seems to be a wrapper to
> xterm (right down to the help), but doesn't preserve the quoting for
> arguments.  BTW, I tried single, double or even triple escaping the
> quotes to no avail -- e.g.,
>   xfterm4 -fa \"Bitstream Vera Sans Mono\"
>   xfterm4 -fa \\"Bitstream Vera Sans Mono\\"
>   xfterm4 -fa \\\"Bitstream Vera Sans Mono\\\"
> 
> Just curious if this was a known bug/issue?

I didn't know about it at least. It's not immediately clear to me how 
this could be solved, either.
> 
> The obvious workarounds are to either call xterm directly or just put
> the line "XTerm.faceName Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" in the ~/.Xresources
> file.

Yeah, that would have been my suggestion as well ;-)

	Jasper