Description: I have a set of .doc files that get passed between Word on Windows 10 and LibreOffice Writer 5.4.2.2 on Ubuntu. For the most part everything works fine. However, one of the documents recently got munged up after a big edit session on Windows. I can see and edit the document fine on Windows, but when I open it in Writer, several things are wrong. The first thing I noticed was that the left and right arrow keys were operating backwards (right arrow moves left, etc.). Then I noticed that lines of text with punctuation marks at the end of the line were displaying with the punctuation at the beginning of the line. I also noticed some end-of-lines indicated "Arial Unicode MS" as the font, which seemed wrong to me as I had never asked for that. Going back to Word, all the end-of-lines indicate "Times" which is what the majority of the text is. Also note I have reset my user profile to factory settings. Also note that copying and pasting the text to a new document in Writer cures the problem, but loses all my other (desired) formatting. I've attached a small sample extract which demonstrates the problem for me. Any ideas on how to fix this and avoid it happening in the future? Steps to Reproduce: 1. Open the attached .doc file and try the arrow keys. 2. Note the "?What went wrong" should read "What went wrong?" 3. Actual Results: arrow keys move cursor backwards Expected Results: 1. arrow keys should move as indicated 2. "?" should appear at the end of the line. Reproducible: Always User Profile Reset: Yes Additional Info: [Information automatically included from LibreOffice] Locale: en-US Module: safemode [Information guessed from browser] OS: Linux (All) OS is 64bit: no Version: 5.4.2.2 Build ID: 1:5.4.2-0ubuntu0.17.10.1 CPU threads: 2; OS: Linux 4.13; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3; Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); Calc: group User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0
Created attachment 139846 [details] sample test .doc file the small extract of the offending document
Created attachment 139847 [details] current user profile (after factory reset)
The directional settings have changed to RTL. Select all of the text and press Ctrl-Shift-A to revert back to left-to-right. Long-term solution: never, ever juggle .doc files between Word and LibreOffice. It is simply a minefield of interoperability bugs: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=104527&hide_resolved=1