Having to write an article dealing with a part of my diploma project for the Students’ Papers Session in my University, I discovered that some fonts (particularly “ș” and “ț”) were displayed awkward in Writer, the word processing software from OpenOffice.org. By awkward I mean that “ș” and “ț” were using other fonts than “s” and “t”. The strange thing is that this was happening only on my laptop, while on my desktop everything worked okay. Both these machines have the same software stack (Ubuntu 10.04 x86_64 and OpenOffice.org 3.2).

Browsing the web for a solution I couldn’t find anything pointing in the right direction. Still, what I’ve managed to observe was that on my laptop I had a .fonts folder in my home directory which seemed to contain the exact font I was using in Writer (and that was stored in the system fonts folder too). When I looked on my desktop for that specific folder, surprise: there wasn’t any. While this folder keeps user specific fonts, the main folder where the fonts are kept for the entire system is /usr/share/fonts. I’ve then decided to delete the .fonts folder from my home directory (I still don’t know what created it) and then I’ve regenerated the font cache, using this command:

“` bash

Now everything is back to normal in my font world. Maybe I’ll use LaTeX when it’s time to write the real deal.