No quotes or accented characters in LibreOffice
 

I have installed Wheezy and dist-upgraded when Wheezy was released. The packages libreoffice and libreoffice-kde are installed.

Libreoffice is version 3.5.4.2 Build ID: 350m1(Build:2)
KDE is version 4.8.4

I have installed a English keyboard on KDE System Settings. Layout is US English with dead keys.

I cannot create accented characters like "é" in LibreOffice. Neither can I write the dead key itself like " (double quote) while pressing shift-quote space. Nothing appears in the document.

In various other applications, I can write both accented characters and the dead keys themselves. Icedove, Kwrite, web browsers (like this post) produce them correctly.

Bash shell in Konsole produces dead keys, but not accented characters. Vi in a console produces dead keys and accented characters. Which is according to expectation.

I can copy/paste the quotes and accented characters in LibreOffice, so it is not a font problem.

Am I missing something, or is this a bug? Unfortunately googling yields a zillions hit on how it should work.

jlinkels

Hi there,

as the effect seems to be tied to LibreOffice, my first strike would be at LibreOffice's settings.
I found one thing that might have to do with keyboard settings as well: Go to Tools/Options/Language Settings/Language in LibreOffice. Check if Locale Setting is set to "Default".

The shortcoming in bash isn't according to my expectation, because I'm used to having dead keys and accented letters available there. However, this is not KDE, but Gnome/MATE. But keyboard handling is in fact a bit special in the console. For instance, on my system, the usual "paste" shortcut (Shift-Ins) doesn't reliably paste the clipboard contents, but sometimes an apparently random text fragment.

Good point, but that's exactly what I'd expected. Indeed, it doesn't seem to be a font problem, but rather a keyboard problem. And an application-specific one at that.

Hope the LibreOffice settings can get you anywhere.

[X] Doc CPU

No, it doesn't help. :(

What I tried so far:

• Threw away the .kde directory and recreated
• Threw away the .config/libreoffice directory and recreated
• Created a new user and logged in as this user
• Uninstalled and purged LibreOffice and reinstalled
• Installed LXDE and set keyboard type thru setxkbmap
• Installed Linux Mint 14 Debian version and ran in VBox
• Installed Debian 7.0 Live KDE version VBox

Only the last 2 attempts produced a LibreOffice with correct dead keys. Without any additional configuration except for setting the keyboard to US Intl. The LibreOffice version and build is identical to mine.

I cannot draw any other conclusion than that some bug has been left behind from the testing phase when I initially installed the machine. That leaves pretty much no choice as a fresh installation, isn't it? Yikes, just like Windows: the system so complicated and closed that one best starts from scratch.

jlinkels

A number of points:
1. You version is a bit old. Can you try the current version: 4.0.4.2?
2. Can you insert an accented character using the "Special Character..." item found in the "Insert" menu? In the Latin Extended-A subsection you can try lots of accented characters.
3. What font are you using? Try Dejavu Serif which has a full range of characters of every sort.
jdk

Hi there,

depending on what distro you're using, LibreOffice 3.5.x may not be old at all. The distro I'm currently using (Mint 13) still has 3.5.7 as the currently recommend version in its repository, and Mint 12 even features LibreOffice 3.4.4 as its "current" version.

If you don't mind looking a few posts up again, you'll see that jlinkels said he/she could paste text containing these letters into a LibreOffice document and it displays correctly. That renders your question 3. irrelevant, and implies the answer "yes" to your question 2.

[X] Doc CPU

I have considered that. There exists a Debian package. Not sure what dependencies that triggers. I might try just before reinstall.
Yes I can.
I tried various fonts including Dejavu.

By trying various live distros, including Debian 7, I have the feeling it is not in Office, or I should say not just in Office, but a combination of Office and something else unknown.

jlinkels

Does "create" not equal "insert"

Hmm. Different system. I get reminders from Libreoffice itself when I open my copy and there's a notice telling me to "click here" to update my Libreoffice.



I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with you on this one. Perhaps you're not terribly familiar with Libreoffice because using the "Insert Special Character" function" does not involve cutting and pasting, possibly from a different document, at least not on the part of the user. The procedure is entirely internal to Libreoffice and terminates with the user clicking the OK button which then inserts the selected character or characters into the current document. This may or may not be identical to the ctl-c/ctl-v copying and pasting procedure which would mean if one were possible then the other would be as a logical necessity. I have not looked at LO's source code so I don't know how the "Insert Special Character" function works. It does allow you to compose characters consisting of "Combining Diacritical Marks". I was not aware that the ctl-c/ctl-v operation had this function.
As you can see your claim is far from obvious. Often the solution to a given problem involves the "leaving no stone unturned".

Thank you for your attention.
jdk

Can you post the output of the locale command that you entered in a terminal.
jdk

Hi there,

I know that from the Windows version of LibreOffice. However, under Linux I leave all updating to the system's central update manager. I'm very much into system stability, and that's why I rely on what versions the maintainers of a distro see fit for their distro. In years of using Windows, I've seen too often that upgrading to or installing the most recent version of a software bears the risk of breaking the system. That's why I'd rather rely on configurations that have been tested and found trouble-free.

In fact, I simply misunderstood that suggestion of yours. I read it very cursory and thought of opening the character map, selecting certain characters from there and copy/paste them into the document, because that's the way I do it. I know the Insert/Special Character feature, but always use the character map as a separate application. For me, it seems friendlier and has more information.

Then this feature is well-hidden. I can't see or figure out how that is supposed to work. I've only got the matrix of characters, two dropown lists for font and Unicode subrange, and four buttons labeled "OK", "Cancel", Help and "Delete". I couldn't imagine at first what the Delete button is supposed to do, but I found it out by playing and trying. Help doesn't mention anything about combining, either.

We were assuming different things. Apart from that, I agree.
I still keep up my claim about the font, though. If LibreOffice can display a character, it's not a font issue. Whether it composes a character from its basic building block and a combining diacritic mark, or uses the correspondig single-code character - this must not affect the way the character is rendered on the screen.

[X] Doc CPU

I'm glad to see our views converging. Now what about that pesky problem raised by the OP? I'd still like to see his/her locale settings. I'm curious if they contain the UTF-8 versions. Here are mine:
I have 4 keyboard layouts installed: British English, Spanish, Italian and Slovenian (useful for ć, č, š, etc.). If I am typing in non-English it's handy to use one or the other of those layouts.

@OP Can you show us the output of the "locale" command? Have you tried using a different keyboard layout (you can easily switch back and forth between different layouts).
Ciao,
jdk (not java)

Locale showed POSIX for all LC_*.

Setting locale to "en_US.UTF8" in /etc/default and rebooting solved the problem.

No idea as why the default locale was set to POSIX. I should have checked on that of course.

Too bad one never knows which applications act in which way to certain locale and regional settings. LibreOffice was unique in this aspect as far as I know. And then, I really don't see a relationship between keyboard input of a US-intl keyboard and a locale on the application level. If I send a "'+a" to the application I expect it is shown as á because the keyboard driver dictates that.

Thanks all who contributed to the discussion.

jlinkels

First off, you're quite welcome. Secondly, have fun!
ciao,
jdk

An additional note about LANG setting for LibreOffice
 

Hi,

I know this thread is a bit old, but I just wanted to add in a summary of what I found by debugging this exact problem on my Debian system. As a note, my system language defaults to «eo.UTF-8» and I use a Canadian Multilingual keyboard layout.

If you start LibreOffice from the command line, like this:
and you get a result similar to this:
(or whatever locale)
then LibreOffice is guaranteed to experience deadkey issues.

The solution is to set your LANG value to any UTF-8 locale that is supported by Xlib. In my case, setting my locale to «fr_CA.UTF-8» or «en_CA.UTF-8».

Unfortunately, I have to do this every time I start LibreOffice, but I can fix it by creating a wrapper script around «/usr/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice». Unfortunately, I have no idea whether a future update of LibreOffice will clobber my fix. :(