Setting up OpenOffice 2.0 on OS X

Posted January 28, 2006
Filed under: Howto, Tech |

There are two versions of OpenOffice for OS X:

  • The official X11 port that uses Apple’s X11 to present OpenOffice as it appears on a Linux or Windows box. This port is a bit snappier and uses the latest codebase. However, it’s more difficult to install and use and isn’t well-integrated with other OS X apps.
  • NeoOffice, which uses Java to display a slightly modified version of OpenOffice that looks more like a native Aqua application. This port is slightly more sluggish and it uses an older version of OpenOffice. However, it is much easier to use and integrates well with other Mac applications, uses Mac fonts by defaults, etc.

Both are extremely stable and have roughly the same features. The purpose of this post isn’t to argue about which is a better approach to OpenOffice on the Mac. Instead, I want to show — clearly — how to get a good working installation of OpenOffice via X11, since some of the documentation is buried.Installing:

  1. Download and install Apple’s X11 (mount the DMG and double click on the package)
  2. Download OpenOffice for X11 and install by dragging OpenOffice.org 2.0 into your applications folder.

Now installation is technically complete — you can open the application by double clicking on its icon, which will automatically open the X11 server.

However, by default, Mac fonts will not be used in OpenOffice.org. To extend the font selection, download and install Fondu — the open source font converter — by double clicking on the package. With Fondu installed, OpenOffice.org 2.0 will automatically attempt to convert as many of your fonts as possible from the Mac format to TTF, which it can use.

Note: It is also possibly to manually convert fonts using Fondu. From the Terminal, use the syntax:

fondu path/fontname

and Fondu will create a TTF file of the supplied font.

Even after Fondu has been installed and your font library has been extended, the fonts may not look 100% right on the screen. This is because X11 treats fonts differently when printing than when displaying on screen. However, any printed file or exported PDF should look fine.