question mark � in window titles

[Renardo]

I asked support question 287448 about this issue and Actionparsnip suggested I file a bug about it.

I am running Ubuntu 15.10 with daily updates. When the title of a window contains non-ASCII characters they often (not always) are displayed as "replacement characters" (question mark in diamond, �). I can reproduce this with Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, and LibreOffice. By going to a directory with a non-ASCII sign in its name I can also reproduce it in gnome-terminal.

When I override Compiz (0.9.12.2) with Metacity the characters are displayed correctly.

I see no exact pattern in the affected texts; for instance, the titles of these two URLs both contain an "ö" (U+00F6) but only the first one exhibits the behavior in Firefox, the second displays the "ö" correctly:
* https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B6r
* https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B6ldner

When I run compiz in a terminal I see the following messages when the problem occurs:
* unityreak_table (break_type) <unknown>:0 Invalid UTF-8 string passed to pango_layout_set_text()
* unity.windowmanager.x XWindowManager.cpp:107 Impossible to get the property WM_NAMEfor window ... properly: impossible to convert to current locale

My locale ($LANG) is eo.utf8, so there should not be a problem converting any Unicode string.

[gf (gf-interlinks-deactivatedaccount)]

Hello Renardo,
Thank you for submitting this bug and reporting a problem with non-ASCII characters in window titles. You made this bug report in 2016 and there have been several versions of Ubuntu since then.

Could you confirm that this is no longer a problem and that we can close the ticket?
If it is still a problem, are you still interested in finding a solution to this bug?
If you are, could you run the following (only once):
apport-collect 1553561
and upload the updated logs and and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

Thank you again for helping make Ubuntu better.
G

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for compiz (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]