Bug 105159 - Special characters rendered with wrong font
Summary: Special characters rendered with wrong font
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
5.2.4.2 release
Hardware: x86-64 (AMD64) Linux (All)
: medium normal
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2017-01-07 05:19 UTC by Thomas Mayer
Modified: 2017-01-12 14:22 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

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Crash report or crash signature:


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Description Thomas Mayer 2017-01-07 05:19:10 UTC
Description:
Writer renders special characters like "U+24C8 CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTERS" with a wrong font (or fallback).

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Choose Font Arial
2. Insert "Ⓢ" in a Writer document

Actual Results:  
Ⓢ is rendered with serives.

This was not the case for the libreoffice which was shipped with ubuntu 14.04. Now with ubuntu 16.04 and libreoffice 5.1.4.3 or 5.1.6.2 the character is rendered with serives.

See https://storage9.static.itmages.com/i/17/0107/h_1483766300_2100770_46b415f885.png

This happens for _all_ fonts (not only Arial).

Expected Results:
Fonts without serives should render without serives, including special characters and eventual fallbacks for these special characters.

Note that this is a regression. That worked perfectly fine with previous versions.


Reproducible: Always

User Profile Reset: No

Additional Info:
When I do pretty much the same in Gimp, it works as expected:

1. Choose Font Arial
2. Insert "Ⓢ" in a document

Result is rendered sans serifes (see https://storage1.static.itmages.com/i/17/0107/h_1483766331_1635727_c13e463267.png).


User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Comment 1 Thomas Mayer 2017-01-07 05:26:13 UTC
That's how it looks in ubuntu's character table (ubuntu 16.04):

https://storage7.static.itmages.com/i/17/0107/s_1483766727_6953569_b5baefe250.png

Only LibreOffice renders it wrong.
Comment 3 Thomas Mayer 2017-01-07 05:30:27 UTC
This issue has some severity because it renders existing documents differently. In my case, it destroys a company logo, which is not acceptable.
Comment 4 Adolfo Jayme Barrientos 2017-01-12 09:24:20 UTC
You’re using an old version. Can you try updating to 5.2.4 and re-testing? You can add the LibreOffice PPA to get automatic updates: https://launchpad.net/~libreoffice/+archive/ubuntu/ppa
Comment 5 Thomas Mayer 2017-01-12 12:44:38 UTC
Retried on a fresh ubuntu 16.04 installation.

I installed ms fonts:

sudo apt-get install cabextract libmspack0
wget "http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/pool/contrib/m/msttcorefonts/ttf-mscorefonts-installer_3.6_all.deb"
sudo apt-get remove --purge ttf-mscorefonts-installer
sudo dpkg -i ttf-mscorefonts-installer_3.6_all.deb

And updated LO:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/libreoffice-5-2
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Now, with LO 5.2.4.2 it works as expected:

http://storage1.static.itmages.com/i/17/0112/h_1484224896_3805654_88f53da6aa.png

Would be great if this could be backported to LO 5.1 which is shipped with ubuntu 16.04. Please note that I already tested against the latest 5.1 realease which is made available via LO ppa (5.1.6.2).
Comment 6 Xisco Faulí 2017-01-12 12:46:39 UTC
Closing as RESOLVED WORKSFORME as per comment 5.
Backporting to 5.1.X is no longer possible as this branch has reached the end of life.
Comment 7 Thomas Mayer 2017-01-12 13:02:51 UTC
I updated the original system to LO 5.2.4.2, too. But I get the serifes again:

http://storage2.static.itmages.com/i/17/0112/h_1484225974_2630450_d0547dc2cc.png

So this issue is not solved for my original case. But now it could be a configuration issue in LO or somewhere else.
Comment 8 Thomas Mayer 2017-01-12 14:22:46 UTC
I tracked it down.

First, I removed a couple of font packages (asian ones, etc.).

I also cleared the font-cache using fc-cache

After that, I got the unwanted serifes also in ubuntu's character table (that was not the case for my screen shot before, so LO diverged from that!).

Then I right clicked the "Ⓢ" character on both systems, the working one and the not-working one.

As it turned out, all there was to do was to install a package named fonts-noto-cjk which can serve as a fallback font for my special character (which seems not to be contained in Arial).

And the good thing is: It does not have serives.

Now, everything is working again as expected. It's not a bug in LO, it was just a configuration issue, eventually together with a missing font package.