Comment 12 for bug 41411

This bug report was originally about a rendering issue with the Nimbus fonts (an issue which I think has been resolved); it would have been less confusing to open a new report for the mapping question.

According to /etc/fonts/conf.d/30-metric-aliases.conf, the preferred mapping for Times is Nimbus Roman No9 L, and only if it's unavailable is a fallback to Times New Roman used. This makes sense to me, as Times and Times New Roman are not the same font. I'm not sure why you're expecting Times to map to Times New Roman instead of to Nimbus?

The Liberation fonts are also not given preference over Nimbus for the "Times" family, only for the "Times New Roman" family. This seems consistent to me.

> There is also a bug in that OOo shouldn't be defaulting to using 'Times' as a font
> since there is no 'Times' font installed which has caused this issue to become
> a much bigger issue since if a user creates a document with 'Times' on Ubuntu
> with the Nimbus substitution and then tries to move it to some other system it
> will not layout the same due to incorrect(?) metrics of Nimbus.

What are these other systems using to implement "Times"?

I'm not sure how this bug can be resolved, either in OpenOffice or in fontconfig. It looks to me like it's a bug in other systems for assuming Times == Times New Roman, and that they're metric-compatible. You could change the OOo package to default to Times New Roman instead of Times to address this assumption elsewhere, but it looks like we would still have the problem that we don't have any TNR fonts installed by default, so the resulting documents would still render differently on systems with TNR than on those without. Until/unless we can resolve that, I think the current behavior of both OOo and fontconfig is probably correct, since in that case the document is at least rendered correctly on the *author's* computer even if it's mis-rendered elsewhere.