I'm new to this, I hope this is going to the appropriate forum.
I've downloaded OO 2.0 for Mac OS X, it is fantastic. It is also very unwieldy for Mac users. The help file is of no use, nor the various archived e-mail and forum tips. Why? Well, OO has evolved, and so has the X11 interface for the Mac. All old instructions are not likely to work.
Most of OO 2 works "out of the box" in OS X 10.42 Tiger; however, Mac users have long since memorized key-commands for copying, pasting, cutting and undo, that are standard across the Mac platform. Using "Control" is an extra mental step. Since OO is running under the Apple versions of X11 (I'm assuming for the sake of this note), the first thing is to regain Mac key strokes. This is done simply, by, under X11 preferences, disabling the "enabling Key Equivalents."
More importantly, since OO does not read the Mac font folders, instead having its own, one has to install desired fonts using an included executable file called "spadmin." For Mac users, the help file directions are unhelpful. Why? Because the 2.0 version of OO for OS X is included in a "package" which differs from ordinary directories, and since spadmin is in the package (contents/ openoffice.org2.0/share/program/spadmin), there are some tricks to get spadmin to run as an "application" under X11. First, let me go back and say you will only be able to see the internals of the package if you hold down the Control key while clicking on openoffice.org2.0 and selecting "view package contents" -- then you can continue to navigate until you see "spadmin" within the program directory. But then you have to give the path to spadmin to X11, and simply typing a path statement with forward slashes won't do it for you. This is a package, remember? Shades of backslashes a la DOS and switches! Really. The way to get the correct path is to reveal the package, navigate to spadmin, open up Mac's Terminal program in an adjacent window, drag spadmin into it, and it will display the proper path. Here's the way it appeared in mine: /Applications/OpenOffice.org\ 2.0.app/Contents/openoffice.org2.0/ program/spadmin -- notice the backslash in the midst of the second entry, who'd have known? Well, now you do. Don't copy and paste my example, 'lest you installed OO somewhere else; find spadmin and drag it into Terminal to get the proper path in your machine. Then copy that path and got to X11, choose Applications -->Customize, in the leftr column, name your "application" OpenOffice Admin or whatever is meaningful to you, then hit the tab key and in the middle section paste in the path you copied out of Terminal. Click on Done, and, well, you're done. Go to X11s Applications menu and choose your new application, and (wait for a few seconds for it to boot) voila! -- spadmin will launch and you can import fonts.
But waitaminute!! You have to have acceptable fonts to import. Mac fonts as supplied are generally a no-no. Windows fonts, yes, but you're asking for headaches due to font table weirdness. The fonts that work best are Unix. If you don't have any of these, you'll have to convert your favorite fonts to Unix format. One way is to go through the horror of downloading Fink and using Fondu. There you can convert your Mac fonts to Unix format, but for some this has been problematic (sometimes resolved by deleting the pspfonts.config file in the truetype directory [Yeah, I know, if you're converting and/or installing Type 1 fonts it is weird they're being installed in a truetype directory]). If Fondu isn't doing it for you, or you don't want to bother with the Fink download, you can convert all your fonts to Unix (except OpenType and some datafork only Unicode fonts) in OS 9 using either Fontographer or Metamorphosis. Well, I'm sorry if it is a hassle; I think it is worth it, since once you have OpenOfffice running, you will be astounded that it actually is more powerful than the commercial Office package that costs many hundreds of dollars.
Unless I'm deluged, I'd consider converting batches of people's fonts to Unix for $5 a 4-weight family or $3 an individual face (around $7-8 for fonts with more weights/variants); at this cost, I'm not making any real money, so this is not a commercial offer where I get rich, it is part of my belief that Open Office is a real alternative for the Mac and should be used and supported. One other note: MultiMaster fonts don't seem to work, so don't bother to send me those. As for the little bit of money, I' won't charge your PayPal account until I've determined that the converted font works okay. The fee is a pittance anyway, something to keep my fonts hobby going.
If it turns out I get too many requests, I reserve the right to demur; my motivation is to see that people have an alternative to M$ and yet have access their Mac typography in OpenOffice. BTW, don't send me any fonts you don't legally own, and e-mail me first if you do intend to request conversions ( you'll probably get an answer concerning paying me the few bucks via PayPal).
Some will wonder why they shouldn't simply go for NeoOffice/J, which reads your O'S X fonts folders directly -- well, NeoOffice is good (recommended in fact for simple letters, spreadsheets and elementary presentations, as it is based upon OO 1.1.4) , but it is slow due to its reliance on Java, and lightweight compared to the full OpenOffice 2 distribution with X11, which is fast. At the moment it executes as a script, which can be confusing, but if you lose it, you can always bring your OpenOffice window back through X11. This and the small inconvenience of a set of menus beneath the Mac menus, are minor when you consider the cost and the power. OpenOffice is in fact more powerful than M$ Office once you get accustomed to it (for example, being able to fax using the CUPS system built into the underlying BSD directly from any OO page).
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