Issue 23256 - Non-ascii characters don't work on utf-8 Linux machines
Summary: Non-ascii characters don't work on utf-8 Linux machines
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE of issue 16318
Alias: None
Product: General
Classification: Code
Component: ui (show other issues)
Version: OOo 1.1
Hardware: All Linux, all
: P4 Trivial (vote)
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: christof.pintaske
QA Contact: issues@framework
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2003-12-07 09:54 UTC by dybdahl
Modified: 2003-12-11 18:14 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

See Also:
Issue Type: DEFECT
Latest Confirmation in: ---
Developer Difficulty: ---

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Description dybdahl 2003-12-07 09:54:27 UTC 
When a machine only knows utf-8 character set, you cannot enter non-ascii
characters in any OpenOffice.org application with the keyboard.

It is very simple to reproduce:

1) Install Red Hat Linux 8.0 using default settings.
2) Try to type text in any non-English, non-Ascii language. You will fail.

With Fedora Core 1, that has OpenOffice 1.1, this error is still there.

This bug is very serious, since it prevents the use of OpenOffice.org on many
Linux machines, and it becomes more and more Linux machines that use utf-8 day
by day.

There is one workaround: To set "LANG=da_DK.iso-8859-1" into the *.desktop files
that activate OpenOffice.org - this just makes all non-ascii characters in
filenames appear incorrect in File/Open and File/Save. This workaround is what I
use personally on all the computers that I know - I just instruct people not to
use non-ascii characters in Openoffice.org filenames.

This bug is in Red Hat's bug database, but I couldn't find it in
openoffice.org's own bug database. It's more than a year old, and prevents
openoffice.org usage on Linux machines that use utf-8. This is the default on
Red Hat Linux 8.0.
Comment 1 thorsten.martens 2003-12-08 09:03:34 UTC 
TM->US: Please have a look, sounds like a font-problem to me. Thanks !
Comment 2 ulf.stroehler 2003-12-10 14:04:42 UTC 
When starting the OOo it prints a meaningful warning message to std out: 
I18n: X Window System doesn't support locale "da_DK.utf8"

That means that the locale isn't supported by X. Then OOo falls back to "C" what
makes it impossible to enter any other characters than ASCII.

Note: for instance gedit also throws a warning in this locale:
"Gdk-WARNING **: can not set locale modifiers".

Thus for me it looks like a bug in the RH provided X server.
BTW: also reproducible with RH9.

@submitter: as a workaround you can set "da_DK" in /etc/sysconfig/i18n and use
startx from a console. Or configure your gdm or whatever display manager you are
using to use an ISO locale instead of utf-8 (try editing
/etc/X11/gdm/locale.alias) .

Transferring to CP.
US->CP: for me this looks like a variant of issue 16318 (?).
Is it possible to find a smarter fallback than "C" if a locale isn't supported by X?
Comment 3 christof.pintaske 2003-12-11 18:13:55 UTC 
yep, duplicate to i16318

*** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 16318 ***
Comment 4 christof.pintaske 2003-12-11 18:14:40 UTC 
closed duplicate