Ubuntu
openoffice.org package

reporting a bug in Open Office apps

Asked by tjslager

I tried to report a bug in Open Office. From the Help menu in OO Writer, I selected Report a Bug. I was sent to Launchpad with no way to report the bug. It's as if they think I'm one of the bug fixers. To put it mildly, I'm confused by what happens.

If on the off chance I can use this as a bug report forum, then I would like to report that OO does a poor job of rendering unicode combined characters. I figured it was a Linux problem, until I noticed that the little accessory, Tomboy Notes, renders combined characters perfectly.

Tone marks over capital letters: Tomboy puts the tone mark above the character; in OO the tone mark steps on the character.

Combined nasalization and tone marks: Tomboy puts the tone mark above the nasalization tilde; OO renders them on top of each other.

Combined nasalization and tone marks over upper case characters. Tomboy: perfect; OO: let's not even go there.

Example O + U0303 should display each character of the combined character, so that it looks like U00d6. Add a high tone mark such as U0301, and the tone mark should appear above the tilde. As it is they are all mashed together, ugly and unreadable.

I have to tell my friends in Liberia that if they want to read a Bassa document written in OO, they have to save it as an MS file on media, find a Windows computer, open the file in Word (or Excel) and then read or print it.

Not ideal.

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tjslager
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Omegamormegil (omegamormegil) said : 		#1

Sorry you are having trouble! When you say "I was sent to Launchpad with no way to report the bug.", could you describe the page you arrived at, or perhaps paste the URL here? What version of Ubuntu are you using? It's great that you want to help OpenOffice.org by reporting this bug. I'll go over the basic steps you should encounter after clicking "Report a Bug", as you have done.

When you click Report a Bug in OOo, a program called Apport should start. After apport collects some data, it will take you to launchpad where you will have to log in. After logging in, you should be presented with a page that says "Report a Bug" in big, red letters. This gives you a box to type in the summary/title of the bug report. You should probably say something like "unicode tone marks overlap letters in openoffice.org Writer". Click continue, and you'll see "Is the bug you are reporting one of these?" in red. If it isn't one of those, scroll to the bottom of the page and put a dot in "No, I'd like to report a new bug". Make sure the "In what package did you find this bug" field says openoffice.org. Fill in the bug description. Be sure to include what was supposed to happen, and what actually happens, as well as your version of Ubuntu and the version of OOo you are using.

Before reporting the bug, it's always a good idea to go to launchpad and see if you can find an existing bug report with a search. Here's a link to OpenOffice.org's bug page: https://bugs.launchpad.net/openoffice

You can It also couldn't hurt to do google it quickly. You might save yourself the time it takes to report a new bug.

As for your friends, does openoffice.org print the characters correctly? As the odt file is unreadable, perhaps printing your document to PDF will create a more readable page? You can test this by opening the document in OpenOffice.org Writer, and going to File>Export as PDF

Let me know! If your problem is solved, please mark it as such here. Thanks for the question!

Revision history for this message
tjslager (tim-slager) said : 		#2

I was able to find the OpenOffice.org bug page and file it there. Thanks.

Printing gives me the same results as viewing. I have not checked a PDF export. I will try that too. Thanks again.

tims