Bug 50420

Summary:	EDITING: Formulas in Writer disappear / get garbled
Product:	LibreOffice	Reporter:	AgeveRifier
Component:	Writer	Assignee:	Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE
Severity:	major	CC:	AgeveRifier, jbfaure
Priority:	medium
Version:	3.4.5 release
Hardware:	x86 (IA32)
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature:		Regression By:

Description AgeveRifier 2012-05-28 02:47:16 UTC

Background:
When doing some homework, I need to enter lots of different formulas in one "big" Writer document.
Some formulas are similar to each other, so I sometimes copy and paste and end edit the copy to get the results.

Overview:
Sometimes, when re-visiting sections of the document I haven't touched in a while, there are very few formulas where this bug appears:
- First, the formula looks totally garbled. Either stretched out, shrinked, sometimes original size (all three: fact)
(Note that especially the last one is nasty, since I don't notice until it's too late)
- It seems that sometimes there's a wrong formula being displayed (wild speculation!)
- The "stretched out / shrinked" size of the old, correct formula seems to always match the size of the new, incorrect formula
- When double-clicking the buggy formula, the formula is re-rendered with a wholly different formula, and the text it is made from is replaced, too.
Sometimes this "wholly different formula" is an older version of that specific formula object, or contains something from a different object that doesn't share the copy-paste-tree with it (not 100% sure about the last statement).

This is VERY annoying, since I have to scan the whole paper every single time I finish something. And for each buggy formula, I have to retype the whole thing, after finding out what it's actually meant to say.

Steps to Reproduce:
I regrettably haven't found a predictable, easy way. The long way is:
1) Open LibreOffice Writer

2) Create a few formulas, write unique (so we can see the effect later) stuff into them

3) Copy, paste, edit, save, close, open a few dozen times.
Sorry that I can't provide more specific instructions here.

Actual Results: Formulas got "garbled": The text (Like "x^2+3") is replaced by something wrong (which is THEN rendered on the screen, being correctly scaled).

Expected Results: Formulas stay the same unless edited.

Build Date & Platform: (what it reports in the Help > About Section)
LibreOffice 3.4.5
OOO340m1 (Build:502)
$ uname -a
Linux myfed 3.1.0-7.fc16.i686 #1 SMP Tue Nov 1 21:00:16 UTC 2011 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
(I do notice that I don't have the latest version of LibreOffice. Trying to update...)

Additional Builds and Platforms:
I currently can't test this for any other platform.

Additional Information:
I don't get what I'm supposed to write here.

Comment 1 AgeveRifier 2012-05-28 03:28:52 UTC

Could somebody mark this as the *unresolved* duplicate of https://pokersource.info/show_bug.cgi?id=45349 ?

Comment 2 Jean-Baptiste Faure 2012-05-28 03:45:21 UTC

(In reply to comment #1)
> Could somebody mark this as the *unresolved* duplicate of
> https://pokersource.info/show_bug.cgi?id=45349 ?

If this bug is a duplicate, so it is fixed but the bug of which it is a duplicate is not. So no problem to mark this as fixed/duplicate. If you want you can add comments to bug 45349 if you think that informations in this bug report give useful supplementary data.

Best regards. JBF

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 45349 ***

Comment 3 Dakota Moses 2023-04-17 09:33:13 UTC Comment hidden (spam)

I can totally relate to this issue, it's really frustrating when you have to retype the whole formula again and again because it gets garbled or replaced with something else. This problem seems to occur when copying and pasting formulas and editing them in a big Writer document. It's strange that there isn't a specific set of instructions to reproduce the problem, but I appreciate the effort to provide some steps. It's also interesting that sometimes an older version of the formula or something from a different object is displayed instead of the correct one. Online writing services: https://top20writingservices.com/

I hope you were able to update your LibreOffice version and see if the problem is resolved. If not, you could try searching the LibreOffice bug tracker or forums to see if anyone else has reported this issue or if there are any workarounds. Thank you for sharing your experience with this bug, it's important for the community to be aware of these issues and find solutions together.