False default font "Times" in OpenOffice.org

[Milan]

Almost a year ago, I reported an issue [1] that appeared in OO.o Witer
in Feisty: the default font is set to "Times", which does not exist and
actually acts as an alias for the former default "Nimbus Roman No 9 L"
(this does not affect users that upgraded from Edgy and older).

The problem is, people believe this font exists, but they cannot choose
it from the fonts list when they want to use it. This is misleading and
does not help to become familiar with Ubuntu's own and good fonts.

This was introduced by a patch:
openoffice.org (2.2.0-0ubuntu1) feisty
  * Use Times/Helvetica as the default font for writer documents (calc and
    impress still pick up the DejaVu screen font).

by Matthias Klose (who does great work apart from that) on Thu, 29 Mar
2007. Debian does not use it, nor AFAIK does Fedora.

I could not get more explanation of the rationale of this decision. OO.o
automatically chooses the right font according to what is installed, so
there's no need for hardcoding an alias. Substitution is only needed for
e.g. "Times New Roman", and can be nicely used with the Liberation
Fonts, but it is not needed for the default font.


So I raise this point here hoping that some developers can
explain/debate on this better (Matthias, more information?) since a bug
report is not ideal for that.


Cheers


1: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/105906