Comment 4 for bug 1852183

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ethanay (ethan-y-us) wrote : Re: [X11] copy/paste (clipboard) is broken in Ubuntu 19.10

I can only reproduce this bug in LibreOffice Calc (spreadsheet). I cannot reproduce it in Writer or Geary.

But it is a consistent problem for me in Calc.

Here are the symptoms/process:
1. First new copy invariably fails to copy text, instead copies/stores a bitmap image.
2. If I "cut" instead of "copy" then I have to use the "undo" function to restore the text so I can attempt again.
3. Undoing my paste/cut operations consistently causes LibreOffice to crash.
4. Second attempt at cut/copy invariably succeeds.

I will try to grab a crash report as it seems specifically related to this bug.

I noticed this immediately upon upgrading from 19.04 to 19.10, all with latest stock kernel/software/updates. IE, using the standard versions in the repositories.

The behavior from this bug has the potential to cause data loss: When LibreOffice crashes before "undo" can restore the cut text, whatever chunk of data that was intended to be cut gets completely discarded and does not get recovered with the rest of the document, probably because it was stored in a buffer somewhere separate from the actual document data itself.

So all in all this bug converts text into image and then deletes the data altogether.