Hebrew Menus texts unreadable - characters show up as square blocks

[EliCoten]

I have my system locale set to Hebrew. Most applications seem to work fine, but recently I have noticed that LibreOffice has become unusable because the menu texts all show up as square blocks. Other applications display Hebrew in their menus fine so it is somethin specific to LibreOffice.

WORKAROUND: Set the Locale to English (or another language that the Ubuntu font displays correctly), from within LibreOffice go to Tools -> Options, View and untick 'Use System Font'. Then set the locale back to Hebrew and all displays correctly, albeit in a different font.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: libreoffice 1:3.4.4-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-14.23-generic 3.0.9
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-14-generic i686
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: i386
CheckboxSubmission: ad9a15703e19217cb3448f881e125f6a
CheckboxSystem: abc83e3988b72e7c3a9b3aa684cb92fd
Date: Sat Dec 24 21:32:57 2011
SourcePackage: libreoffice
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-25 (60 days ago)

[EliCoten (launchpad-elicoten)]

After some searching around I found this discussion at http://sfdev.tapuz.co.il/shirshur-236-156463935.htm which explains that the problem is to do with the fonts. It seems that the default Ubuntu font (i.e. the one named Ubuntu) does not support Hebrew properly, so instead it displays squares. (Try typing Hebrew in a word processor and changing the font to Ubuntu - the characters are displayed as squares).

A workaround is to set the Locale to English (or another language that the Ubuntu font displays correctly), from within LibreOffice go to Tools -> Options, View and untick 'Use System Font'. Then set the locale back to Hebrew and all displays correctly, albeit in a different font.

So either the Ubuntu font needs to be expanded to include the characters for Hebrew, or there needs to be some sort of fall-back font that LibreOffice menus can use when the characters for the current language are not supported by the default font.

[Ilan Tal (ilan-tal)]

Eli shalom,
On this system "Use system font for user interface" is checked and I can set Hebrew as the locale and all works perfectly well. Thus it seems in most cases the default Ubuntu font does indeed support Hebrew. On my friend's computer, on the other hand, there IS a problem.
So maybe there are 2 different versions of the default Ubuntu font? On this computer there is a good one and on your computer and my friend's computer, a bad one? It sounds a bit far fetched, but how can one explain what we see?

In any case, I'll try the work around on my friend's computer.
Ilan

[EliCoten (launchpad-elicoten)]

Why is this incomplete? What more information do you need?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[EliCoten (launchpad-elicoten)]

Why was this marked as incomplete?

[Björn Michaelsen (bjoern-michaelsen)]

Its incomplete as we need to know what the difference is between the two machines in comment 3 so we can find a reproduction scenario.

Having said that: this seems to be a dupe of bug 568492?

[EliCoten (launchpad-elicoten)]

I decided to try it again on my computer since it was a while since this bug was originally filed.

I went back in and ticked "use system font for user interface" and then restarted LibreOffice and guess what - it worked! So I presume an update, either to Ubuntu or to LibreOffice has corrected the problem. I'm now using Ubuntu 12.04 whereas this bug was reported in Ubuntu 11.10

[Björn Michaelsen (bjoern-michaelsen)]

Marking this one as fix release then. If you see something similar, please check bug 568492 (which currently is still open) before reopening this one.