Bug 50349 - Font combobox sets font for whole selection, rather than one script
Summary: Font combobox sets font for whole selection, rather than one script
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
unspecified
Hardware: Other All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: Fonts-Name-Combobox
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Reported: 2012-05-25 05:37 UTC by Yike
Modified: 2025-05-13 10:05 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

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Description Yike 2012-05-25 05:37:44 UTC
For Chinese characters which have been set to a Chinese font, if you select them and set them to an ASCII font, their Chinese font setting will be lost and be shown in a strange style.

In Microsoft Office, an ASCII font is only effective to ASCII letters in any case, so it doesn't cause Chinese characters to lose their Chinese font settings. It's the surest way to deal with a document which has contents in several languages.

Though we can specify different fonts for different languages through character style settings in LibreOffice, sometimes the character style settings may be lost when opening the document next time. If the document is opened by Microsoft Office, the problem will be more serious.
Comment 1 Urmas 2012-11-08 13:24:44 UTC
Confirmed in 3.6.3.
Comment 2 QA Administrators 2015-01-05 17:51:40 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 3 QA Administrators 2016-01-17 20:03:14 UTC
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Comment 4 QA Administrators 2019-05-14 02:55:47 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 5 QA Administrators 2021-05-14 04:10:41 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 6 QA Administrators 2023-05-15 03:17:40 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 7 Jonathan Clark 2025-05-13 10:04:28 UTC
This request is subjective, so I'm marking it an enhancement request rather than a bug.

Currently, when you select text and choose a font using the combobox, LibreOffice assigns that font to all of the script types represented in the selection.

For example, the text "water 水" contains both Latin and Asian script types. If you select that text and assign Noto Serif with the combobox, LibreOffice will set both the Latin and Asian fonts to Noto Serif. LibreOffice does this even though Noto Serif does not contain CJK characters.

In contrast, Microsoft Word uses some sort of heuristic to determine which script types are covered by a given font. It's unclear to me exactly how this heuristic works, but in limited testing I'm not sure Microsoft Word gets this 100% right. Choosing a CJK font also seems to apply it to Western text, but not vice-versa; however, choosing a font that supports both Western and Arabic only seems to apply it as a Complex font. The behavior is somewhat confusing to me.

I see the utility of this enhancement. However, I also think there's a good argument that we shouldn't try to be more clever than the user when there's a high chance that we'll guess their intentions wrong.