Impossible to change between left-to-right and right-to-left text direction

[joehill]

Binary package hint: libreoffice

I have been using LibreOffice for a couple months now (before that OpenOffice.org) and I recently noticed there is no way to switch between right-to-left and left-to-right text directions. I have customized the formatting toolbar and checked both the Right-to-Left and Left-to-Right to be visible, but they do not appear in the toolbar between the buttons they are listed between in the customize dialog. The keyboard shortcut I have always used to change from Right-to-Left to Left-to-Right, Ctrl-Shift-A, is listed in the keyboard customizations as correctly associated with this function, but when I press this combination nothing happens. So it seems the RTL and LTR function is completely broken.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: libreoffice-core 1:3.3.2-1ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic i686
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue May 3 00:08:31 2011
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release i386 (20101007)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: libreoffice
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-04-29 (3 days ago)

[joehill (joseph-hill)]

I looked into this a bit more and found this bug in OO.o, which seems to cover the bug I've reported:

http://openoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=54423

Apparently the LTR and RTL buttons never appear if CTL support is disabled and always appear if it is enabled (regardless of whether you check them in the customization menu). I have enabled CTL support and both the buttons and key combination work.

To me, this would not be the expected behavior. First, perhaps fewer people would spend a lot of time hunting down/reporting bugs and troubleshooting if CTL were enabled by default. I'm not trying to read/write complex languages--just trying to get a document a student sent me to read correctly as an LTR document (it's an MS Word file, and apparently it looks LTR on Word and RTL on LO). This discrepancy may be a bug in either MS Word or LO. But the ideal behavior would be to enable CTL by default, as far more users will be inconvenienced by disabling it than by enabling it, and the behavior of showing buttons in a menu that never show up is not user friendly at all.

[penalvch (penalvch)]

joehill, thank you for reporting this bug and helping make Ubuntu. Could you please attach the file that your trying to get to read LTR?

[Björn Michaelsen (bjoern-michaelsen)]

[This is an automated message.]
There are no new official OpenOffice.org releases in Ubuntu packaging anymore => Won't Fix

If the problem persists, please mark this bug as "also affects project Libreoffice" or "also affects distribution Libreoffice (Ubuntu)" if that has not happened already.

Please leave references to upstream OpenOffice.org bugs in place to allow cross pollination.

[Bob Merhebi (bobmerhebi)]

I'd also like to confirm this. I just realized this when attempting to use the left-to-right & right-to-left buttons. They simply don't appear in the formatting toolbar & do not appear when checked to be visible!

I am using LibreOffice Version 3.6.0.2 (Build ID: 360m1(Build:102)) on Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS with kernel 3.2.0-33-generic