Encoding Problems with libreoffice

Ask Fedora
1

Recently I installed Fedora 35 (KDE Plasma Spin) again on my machine, because I had to do significant changes to the partition layout. To my surprise, I now have an issue with all libreoffice files residing in a path with a non ASCII character:

a988b0d0230d360976d04ea7c7b707a7f53409e5.png
a988b0d0230d360976d04ea7c7b707a7f53409e5.png1000×565 28.4 KB

It only affects libreoffice as far as I can tell. Any ideas?

This is my locale output:

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
2

That is not a valid character in the english language character set and is seen as such.

There are many libreoffice-langpack-?? packages and maybe if you installed the appropriate one for the language that comes from it would fix the issue. My system by default has only the libreoffice-langpack-en installed but according to dnf there are 70 additional langpacks available.

1 Like
3

well, it is definitly a valid UTF-8 character, and it was definitly working before. I installed some languagepacks, but that did not change anything.

Notable difference to my previous setup: this time I am on luks-lvm-btrfs, while before it was luks-lvm-ext4, can this be related?

4

According to wikipedia that is a german language character.

5

of course it is, like me :smiley:

but this happens also with any other non ASCII characters. I handle lots of spanish docs as well, so those ñ and á aren’t behaving nice either.

However, while thinking about this problem, I started to doubt that this is a libreoffice problem, since the popup looks like it comes from dolphin. And I think I am right:

f430e9a134a11c263937b9fb89597168307ab983.png
f430e9a134a11c263937b9fb89597168307ab983.png1173×559 36.5 KB

So I think it’s a dolphin problem and no libreoffice problem. However, it only affects libreoffice. having for example an image with such a character is fine (for gwenview, gimp, etc).

6

Problem solved. I think the important bit was:

file: ~/.config/plasma-localerc
content:

[Formats]
LANG=en_DE.UTF-8

I don’t know whether en_DE.UTF-8 is a valid value here, but I doubt it. I’ve seen similar issues on Windows, when running an US-english system with german date and number formats. However, now it says:

[Formats]
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

and the problem went away