Re: guessing font width

[Jon K Hellan <hellan acm org>]

bill lam wrote:
> I use gnumeric on debian and I use dejavu sans mono, but each time
> gnumeric started opening excel files will give a warning
>
> ** (gnumeric:11164): WARNING **: EXCEL : unknown widths for font
> 'DejaVu Sans Mono', guessing
>
> the width it guessed seemed smaller than actual and it made column
> width that based on this font be narrower than it should be.  Why does
> it need to guess when that dejavu  font has been installed in system?
> (I can choose the font within gnumeric's font dialog box).
>
> gnumeric version '1.9.4'
>
> thanks in advances.

The way the Excel plugin handles font metrics can certainly be improved. We use a static table,
However, DejaVu is basically Bitstream Vera with more Unicode characters added, right? Could you
see if things look better if you add a line

                { "DejaVu Sans Mono",  9,     0x0900, 32.0 },


after the "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" line in plugins/excel/ms-excel-util.c, l.280 or so?
If you aren't used to building from source, the easiest way on Debian is:

  apt-get source gnumeric
  apt-get build-dep gnumeric
  apt-get install fakeroot
  cd <gnumeric source directory>
  dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
  cd ..
  dpkg -i gnumeric-x.y.z-blabla.deb

Regards

Jon Kåre