while researching the german word “wallen” i bought the universalwörterbuch from duden, a respected and well-known dictionary publisher in german speaking countries. the download page offers a debian–ubuntu package of officebib, the underlying application for a series of dictionaries from duden and other publishers. running kubuntu i naturally chose that one to install — and it worked…

…it worked but in contrast to all other applications was using pixel fonts instead of truetype fonts, rendering all text rather ugly. today i did a bit of searching around whether other folks had encountered this issue and had perhaps found a way around it. eventually i came across a post on the {} blog (sic) which recommended not to use the .deb package but instead to one of the .rpm packages:

% sudo apt-get install fakeroot alien

will install the pre-requisites. then download the SuSE .rpm package and turn it into a debian package like so:

% fakeroot alien officebib-5.0.4-1-suse.rpm

and install it:

% dpkg -i officebib_5.0.4-2_i386.deb

voila! no more ugly fonts.

now, why doesn’t duden do this instead of providing a flawed .deb package? puzzled.