Bug 159755

Description:
Hi all:

I was happily using LibreOffice Writer, obviously the best word processor ever ;-) , on my on Ubuntu MATE 22.04.3, when I noticed something weird.

Sometimes, a piece of text in the document which I copied to the clipboard got surrounded with brackets [] in a light gray colour. After a while, I had such markers all over the place.

I took me days to realise that those [] markers are showing the text that belongs to a Bookmark. You can see those Bookmarks in the Navigator panel. They are called something like "__DdeLink__0_2814443403". If you copy and paste text surrounded by the Bookmark marks, you then get a new Bookmark called "__DdeLink__0_2814443403 Copy 1". All very strange.

You cannot select several Bookmarks at once in the Navigator, in order to delete many of them at once. But you can click on the first one and press the Del key many times in a row. Also, if you edit a Bookmark, you land in a dialog box where you can select and delete many bookmarks at the same time.

It turns out that you can turn off those distracting [] Bookmark markers under: Tools, Options..., LibreOffice Writer, Formatting Aids, Display Formatting, Bookmarks [...]

But that only turns off the markers, the Bookmarks are still automatically created. This is problematic: if you open a document only to copy some text off it, then the document becomes "modified". The undo button shows an action you didn't initiate titled "Insert bookmark: __DdeLink__0_2814443403". That is also distracting, because you wonder whether you made some change by mistake.

To top it all, those Bookmarks are not immediately added, and sometimes not at all. It took me a few days to find out that the reason was I am running NetBeans on the PC. Copying a piece of text in LibreOffice Writer, and switching to a source code editor panel in NetBeans is what adds those Bookmarks to LibreOffice Writer. Not very intuitive at all.

As usual with LibreOffice quirks, I wasn't the first one to notice:

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How to stop automatic creation of DdeLink bookmarks from copy or paste command?
https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/how-to-stop-automatic-creation-of-ddelink-bookmarks-from-copy-or-paste-command/55708

Bug 106106 - Unexpected bookmark DdeLink appears after copying text, switching focus to NetBeans and back again
RESOLVED NOTOURBUG 
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106106

LibreOffice Writer: Automatic Bookmark Creation while Keyboard Maestro Engine is Running
https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/libreoffice-writer-automatic-bookmark-creation-while-keyboard-maestro-engine-is-running/97599/3

Bug 137534 - EDITING Odd bookmark creation at copy action in presence of qlipper 
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137534
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A few years later you would have thought that the developers of the best word processor ever would have realised that this is a recurrent problem, and that you shouldn't really let users run into it again and again.

But no worries, I am here to help!!!

How about adding an option to turn off generating such "DDE Links"? Or disable DDE altogether. Wasn't that a Windows thing anyway? Are many people who still need this?

How about adding a separate "Copy as DDE" menu option? This way, the normal "Copy" would never create DDE links.

How about writing up what I need to tell the NetBeans people (and others), in order to prevent this annoyance? That is assuming they are willing to help, as they may create their own bug and close it with "NOTOURBUG" too. After all, who is responsible for this problematic interaction, NetBeans of LibreOffice?

I am specifically looking for some technical description about what the NetBeans (and others) developers need to stop doing or filter out when using the system clipboard in order to prevent triggering this annoying behavior in LibreOffice.

Thanks in advance,
  rdiez

Steps to Reproduce:
See above.

Actual Results:
See above.

Expected Results:
See above.


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: No

Additional Info:
See above.