I am absolutely certain that this is an environmental issue, but I can't find the environmental variable that's causing the problem. Ever since I updated from Fedora FC16 to FC17, NO existing user except root can create non-breaking spaces (CTRL-SHIFT-SPACE) in LO. A new user with a pure "default" environment can, but we have tried that and then added ONE-AT-A-TIME additional environmental variables from those common to all existing users. (logging that new user out and then between each addition so as to pick up his environment cleanly, just to be certain). At some point during that process (about 30 env variables in, but it can be anywhere from 28 to 34) some "combination" occurs and removing the most recently added env var does not help - the user still can no longer create them. (This occurs in both the fedora-included LO 3.5.x and in the downloaded 3.6.3 thru 3.6.4.3). All users are using the KDE desktop, although changing an existing user's desktop to gnome, XFCE, or enlightenment (e16) doesn't seem to affect the behavior. Non-breaking spaces in existing documents appear and behave as expected, so it is only the issue that they can't be created. I have written to the fedora user list and nobody responded, so i suspect it is a problem which nobody else is seeing. And of course on a "parallel" (same arch) machine running fedora fc16 it is not possible to reproduce the problem with any release up thru 3.6.4.3. I have searched the archives and cannot find any other occurrence of this problem at all - and it is an annoyance but not major. But since I had hoped to give a demo at my office using this machine, the matter is holding that up as well. Thanks
William: To reset the profile, you can take a look here: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/UserProfile Then, could you zip a newly LO directory profile with variables you created (so we don't have a big historic with extensions, customizations, etc.) and attach it here?
Created attachment 71574 [details] created new ~/.config/libreoffice/3/user dir - file requested zip file of same Removing my old profile (user directory) and restarting did not affect the problem at all. I still cannot create fixed spaces (apparently root can but nobody else - although how this could be a permissions issue is beyond me at this point). FWIW I CAN create other <CTRL><SHIFT><CHAR> things like the non-breaking dash/hyphen.
William: could you be more precise with these env variables? What are you doing precisely? Which env variables? (don't hesitate to put the entire commands to be very precise).
As info was requested by Julien - marking as NEEDINFO. @William - if this is still an issue please provide the requested info and then mark the bug as UNCONFIRMED - thanks!
Apparently the bug disappeared sometime since I last wrote in one of the upgrades to the system in question (4 updates to LO plus an update from fedora fc 17 to 19), and because I hadn't needed to make any NB spaces lately (coding, not writing) I didn't notice it until today. FAIK the promblem could have been eliminated in any of the system changes. The ENV vars I was talking about were my "normal" unix env vars, although surprisingly creating a completely unmodified dummy user and using that login and env didn't help the problem at all. The only weird thing was that I suspect there was a read or write permission somewhere along the line because root could always create NB spaces.