Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 116132
Characters Not Rendered in Math
Last modified: 2013-04-02 19:12:59 UTC
Using OpenOffice 3.2.1 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0, when characters U+22b3, U+22b5, U+227b (‘≻’), U+227f (‘≿’), and U+2280 (‘⊀’) are entered in formulae they appear in the editing area, but are not rendered in the output. (These characters are rendered by Writer when entered as ordinary text therein.)
Looks like the same problem as issue 113586. Please check if the described workaround works on your system, thanks!
No, the work-around at issue 113586 does not resolve this problem. OpenOffice was installed using the root account, and the font is presently and only installed system-wide and as per the OpenOffice packages. (All Greek letters (including digamma, qoppa, and sampi) are rendered without apparent difficulty, whereas issue 115620 (indicated to be a duplicate of 113586) involved their not being rendered.)
Cannot reproduce with OOo 3.2.1 on Solaris or Suse 11. Do you work with OOo downloaded from openoffice.org or the one provided by Redhat? Please try the one from our download page.
I got the sale results using the version from OpenOffice.org (first) and that from Red Hat (second). When I posted to a Red Hat El 6 mailing list, someone experimented and got the same problematic result.
OOo 3.3 has a new, enhanced OpenSymbol font. Could you please try if with latest OOo 3.3 RC8. I was not able to see the mentioned problem on RedHat Enterprise linux using OOo 3.3.
I fully installed OpenOffice 3.3.0 RC, and restarted the system; the problem persists in documents that were configured to use Times New Roman for variables in documents that were configured to use Liberation Serif, and in newly created documents configured to use the latter. (ΤΕΧ Gyre has no problem, but I have literally hundreds of existing formulae in documents that are in-play, and there is no mechanism for globally changing the font settings of these.) As noted, at least one other person on the standard RHEL 6 mailing list reports the same problem. (I have not received word from anyone on that list of an inability to reproduce it, FWLIW.)
Could you please try to copy the OpenSymbol font from OOo3.3/openoffice.org/basis3.3/share/fonts/truetype to your systems font directory e.g. /usr/share/fonts/truetype ? This also helped on my SUSE 11.x system.
Unfortunately, the problem persists. I stripped OpenOffice from my system, reinstalled 3.3.0 RC, copied the OpenSymbol font also to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/, ran fc-cache, started OpenOffice and set a JVM, restarted the computer, and checked. The characters remain invisible. (Meanwhile, as of 7 Jan, Red Hat refuses to examine the problem “Because the affected component is not scheduled to be updated in the current release”; which is to say that they won't look for a problem because they wouldn't bother to fix it anyway!)
I'm quite out of ideas... MRU->PL/HDU: do you have any hint/idea why this may not work on the mentioned system?
TL: adding me to cc list. BTW the problem does not seem to exist with Windows (OOo 3.2.1).
tl->oeconomist: As a work-around please try to define those characters as symbols in the symbol catalog and then make use of it. The difference would be that in the symbol define dialog you can explicitly choose which font is to be used whereas you can not influence what font gets used if you simply type that character in the edit window. Also if you are already using 3.3 or a current developer snapshot you can now easily see the Unicode position of the selected characters. You can also try to set ALL the top 4 fonts listed in the Format/Fonts dialog to a font that actually contains those characters, because at least on my Windows box the Times New Roman does NOT contain those characters which might be part of the problem.
The problem with either of those work-arounds is that I have active documents with hundreds of pre-existing formulæ, and cannot simply effect global changes.
TL: HDU said it seems the issue can not be solved unless the problem can be debugged. It probably is a problem with font fall back which seems to find the characters in case of the edit window but not in case of the graphic window. Thus the problem needs to be reproduced in-house in order to look further into this.
I believe that, specifically, there is a problem with how OpenOffice interacts with that version of fontconfig that is distributed with RHEL 6.0, or at least with that for the i686.
I think that OOo Math uses an incorrect fallback for those characters. The characters you mentioned above are not available in OpenSymbol. Please map these characters with the correct font in Tools.Catalog.Edit. Does this help?
Creating new entries in the Catalogue would side-step the problem for future formula, but so would just using a font (such as some created for ΤΕΧ) which simply has those symbols. My problem is that I already have multiple documents in-progress, some having hundreds of formulæ, with the font specified either to be Liberation Serif or to be Times New Roman. When I was using OpenOffice under RHEL 5.5, the symbols in question were properly rendered. When I converted the system to RHEL 6.0, the symbols vanished from the rendering.
OK, you upgraded your system from RHEL 5.5 to 6... Maybe the fonts are now differently on your system? Is there any font on your system which has the mentioned characters inside? I mean, if not, there is nothing which can be fixed on OOo's site...
There are a number of fonts in my system that have the desired characters. See comment #6 for specific reference to one of them, and #16 for vaguer reference. Your proposals have run in circles, apparently without memory of what has been tried and failed. It has been like watching a house cat try to solve a problem. So, instead, I've used Writer2LaTeX to convert the documents to LaTex, and then imported them into LyX. ( http://www.lyx.org/ ) Yeah, I'd like to have far more WYSIWYG than LyX provides, but an application that works is better than one that fails catastrophically, even if the former doesn't have as nice a UI. I'm done using OpenOffice for professional work, and I've warned friends and colleagues about it.
I hope that you are aware of the fact, that you get a professional product for free - and I hope you are aware of the word "community". Can you imagine, that it is difficult to properly serve almost EVERY Unix distribution on the world? Just these facts should give you the hint, that it is not possible for us to offer support free off charge. Maybe you get help on support.openoffice.org on channels like users@openoffice.org. Just before shouting out loud and blame OOo.org members you should think about these facts. I tried to replicate your problem on Oracle Enterprise Linux which is based on RHEL 6. But it worked correctly with OOo 3.3 and 3.4-dev. So it ist almost like viewing a crystal ball for things which are differently on our systems... and here the word "community" should take its place...
No, part of the inevitable conclusion here is that OpenOffice Math is *not* a professional product. It's interesting, and may eventually evolve into a professional product; but right now it's something less. I've supplied free programs for, literally, decades, and never regarded "free" as an excuse for bugs. You're on *much* better ground when you note the difficulty of attempting to support ever version of Linux. But OpenOffice needs to change how it represents itself if it's not up to proper font-fallback on Linux. You're confusing the unpleasantness of the facts with supposed shouting. I'm entering the same sized characters here as are you, and making no peculiar reliance upon upper-case letter. And I have tried other channels; others found the same problem; no one had a better solution than to report it as a bug. Okay. That -- reporting it as a bug -- too doesn't work. The bug will abide. The meta-solution is to change word-processors; I'm content with that. And if someone else comes here looking for the solution, perhaps the meta-solution will be enough for them. http://www.lyx.org/
This Issue requires more information ('needmoreinfo'), but has not been updated within the last year. Please provide feedback as requested and re-test with the the latest version of OpenOffice - the problem(s) may already be addressed. You can download Apache OpenOffice 3.4.1 from http://www.openoffice.org/download Please report back the outcome of your testing, so this Issue may be closed or progressed as necessary - otherwise the issue may be Resolved as Invalid in the future.
Haha! You've had a thorough description of the problem. Pretty much the only information left to give would be the solution, which I don't have. Well, that is to say that I don't know how to fix the broken-ness of OpenOffice Math. But, as I've explained, one solution to the underlying problem is simply to give-up on this half-baked software and go to LyX, which I did years ago. Have the day that you deserve, Mr Weir.
No offense intended. This was a bulk notice added to 400 or so issues that were stuck in the "needmoreinfo" state. It sounds like we have enough info and can remove that keyword.