Chinese Characters Missing When Printing

[Adrian]

Binary package hint: openoffice.org

When printing Chinese characters, some characters are missed out when printing and the appearance is different from shown on screen, in that some characters appear slightly bolder. Printing via exporting to PDF and then printing to PDF sidesteps this issue.

I've attached an example document. In the example, when I print it, the suffix 们 is missing from the printed output, and 我 and 和 are slightly bolder than the other characters.

A quick Web search shows that other users are having this problem (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=801767) but I couldn't find a matching bug.

I had just printed out an assignment I had to hand in. Fortunately, I checked the document and noticed the problem before leaving home!

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.10
Package: openoffice.org-core 1:2.4.1-11ubuntu2.1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/lib/openoffice/program:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: openoffice.org
Uname: Linux 2.6.27-11-generic i686

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Can you still reproduce this bug on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)?

I tried it with the new version and it seems to work for me.

[Adrian (adrianhesketh-yahoo)]

Hi, thanks for the response. I just updated to Jaunty this morning, and the problem is still occurring. So that's an upgrade from OpenOffice 2.4 to OpenOffice 3.0 too.

Other examples:
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=71249

Similar problem?:
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=15906

It's interesting that the document prints out OK. Perhaps it's a problem with a font and how that's being used or a difference between printers. I'm using a HP Deskjet 5150 printer. However, the fact that printing works fine via PDF points me in the direction of OpenOffice as the culprit.

The font I have listed for that sentence in OpenOffice is "Nimbus Roman No9 L;Times New Roman", but I don't recall installing any non standard fonts.

[Adrian (adrianhesketh-yahoo)]

If I change the font to "WenQuanYi Zen Hei", the printout is fine - no corrupted or missing characters are showing, as shown in the attached photograph of the print out. The top sentence is an attempt to print in the default Nimbus font, the other sentences (the ones which are complete) are using WenQuanYi variants.

So, in this case, the actual bug is that a WYSIWYG word processor is showing something on screen which can't be printed. I've attached a screenshot of the OpenOffice UI and a screenshot of the print preview showing that the printing should be successful.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Till,

Any ideas about this bug? It seems to work for me but maybe there is some sort of font substitution bug?

Chris

[Adrian (adrianhesketh-yahoo)]

I think this might be due to Glyph Fallback. Since Nimbus doesn't have the required glyphs to print the Chinese characters, it's attempting to use another font. It's not clear which font is being substituted, but I'm suspecting that Mincho of some sort is being used. I think it's a Japanese font being substituted, since if you examine the character for drink "he1" 喝 － the Japanese fonts show the "ladle" radical instead of the "person" radical.

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/559d/fontsupport.htm

Since OpenOffice isn't showing the font substitution, I have no idea which font is being substituted, but that's a separate issue: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=23402

[Adrian (adrianhesketh-yahoo)]

I've taken the trouble to make a fresh install on Virtual PC. I can confirm that the problem still occurs and morover, can make the Microsoft Virtual PC image available via FTP on request.

Thanks,
Adrian.

[Adrian (adrianhesketh-yahoo)]

I've marked this as confirmed, since there are at least two duplicate bugs and I've created a Virtual PC image which also demonstrates the same behaviour.

[Adrian (adrianhesketh-yahoo)]

Bug listed at http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=102500

[Mike Durham (mdurhamesq)]

For what it's worth:
Adrian, I used to have this problem on Jaunty but now I don't, since a couple of months ago. I just tried printing your sample file to a ps file and it worked perfectly.
My problem was some of these chars wouldn't print 第一课 换钱 呢最 but now all seems okay.
Sorry to be of no help, but it might encourage you not to give up.
Cheers, Mike

[Adrian (adrianhesketh-yahoo)]

Thanks for your comments. After reading them and other "works for me" comments, I decided to try upgrading to v3.1 using the instructions here:

http://ubuntumanual.org/posts/175/upgrade-to-open-office-3-1-in-ubuntu-jaunty-intrepid-hardy

However, I also patched my system at the same time, so I'm not sure whether this was fixed in OpenOffice (most likely) or some other part of the system.

Any idea when OpenOffice 3.1 will be included in Jaunty? This would solve the bug for other users experiencing the same problem (the problem is likely to be occurring in other non-Western character set scripts).

If any automated testing is used, then it would be a good idea to include this in the testing suite.

[Adrian (adrianhesketh-yahoo)]

What I forgot to say was that upgrading to OpenOffice v3.1 solved the problem, however, the problem remains in Jaunty because there is no automatic upgrade to OpenOffice v3.1 in Jaunty without user intervention.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Fixed in Karmic as noted by the user.

[Zhang Weiwu (zhangweiwu)]

This bug is especially easy to reproduce when you try to open a document authored on Microsoft Windows Simplified Chinese edition. Since one reason is the lack of Windows fonts on Linux, here is a screenshot of how I "correct" this problem by configuring a font mapping table in OpenOffice's options.

See the screenshot. I install this font-mapping for all customers at the moment as a workaround. This lack of proper font mapping issue isn't new, it has been at least 5 years old.