Fonts look bad in Microsoft Office using Wine

Question

Office fonts in wine look very different from what they look in Windows or LibreOffice. As can be seen from the attached screenshots, they look blurry in some sizes and aliased in other sizes. You can see the differences not only in the document text but also in the ribbon menu. It happens with a lot of fonts.

I'm testing it with Office 2010 now, but it also happens in Office 2007.

Things I've tried:

• Changing fontsmooth settings with winetricks -> made no difference.
• Copying fonts from a Windows system -> made no difference.
• Using Ubuntu's fonts (by removing the Windows/Fonts from the wineprefix) -> removed the blurriness in some fonts but increased aliasing.

The three screenshots correspond to different "configurations":

• office_wine.png -> Office Word in Wine using Wine's original fonts;
• office_nowinefonts.png -> Office Word in Wine using Ubuntu's fonts;
• office_windows.png -> Office Word in Windows.

PS: please make sure to see the screenshots without scaling them to notice the problem.

EDIT: A screenshot of how Calibri behaves in Wine here.

Solution

This does have to do with the anti-aliasing in Windows. It expects you to have it on in the OS, so they don't bother re-creating anti-aliasing in the Office Suite. If you disabled the anti-aliasing in Windows, it would look the same.

If wine's own font smoothing does not work, then I don't think it will. Here's a test to make sure its just the display that's wrong. Print something...does it look okay?

Maybe post a complaint on WineHQ under the Microsoft Office information; they may be able to help you more (and possibly fix the problem in their next update).

I have seen this problem too (on my own computer, I have Office installed as well). I learned to ignore it. Also try zooming in on the text to make it look a little better. Setting the view to page-width may help a lot.

Comments

[Curious Apprentice]

Use "Calibre" font. Copy this one from Windows.

[amfcosta]

Do you mean "Calibri"? It does not behave correctly also. I've edited the question to post a screenshot with Calibri.

[fouric]

Do you know if this is specific to your installation? Try booting a Live CD (or creating a virtual machine), install Wine, and then install Word and see if the problem persists. If it does, then it is probably a bug and should be reported to the Wine team.

[amfcosta]

@Andrew Does the screenshot I posted look to you? Or are you talking about your wine+office installation?