Bug 86586 - [Regression] Wingdings compatibility broken on Mac OS X
Summary: [Regression] Wingdings compatibility broken on Mac OS X
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
4.3.3.2 release
Hardware: Other macOS (All)
: low minor
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: notBibisectable, regression
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2014-11-22 17:56 UTC by Milan Bouchet-Valat
Modified: 2016-11-06 17:55 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
ODT file showing 1) & character method and 2) Unicode PUA method (9.23 KB, application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text)
2014-11-22 17:56 UTC, Milan Bouchet-Valat
Details

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Description Milan Bouchet-Valat 2014-11-22 17:56:41 UTC
Created attachment 109858 [details]
ODT file showing 1) & character method and 2) Unicode PUA method

Upgrading from LO 4.0 to 4.3 breaks symbols using the Wingdings font on Mac OS X 10.6. For example, the character & in the Wingdings font used to render as a book, and today it is just a &. One can still insert a book in the Wingdings by using the "Insert special character" dialog (which apparently use Unicode Private Use Areas instead of characters in the ASCII range), but all existing documents need fixing manually. Also, opening documents created under Microsoft Word exhibit the same issue; though in the other direction Microsoft products are able to read both LO 4.0 and 4.3 documents including Wingdings symbols.

This appears to be related to the move to new Core Text APIs under Mac OS X. I have found similar reports and technical documentation from NeoOffice, which has done the move earlier:
http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=8464
http://neowiki.neooffice.org/index.php/Problems_with_the_Symbol_font,_Greek_text,_or_bullets_in_Word_documents#Can.27t_I_just_type_using_the_Symbol_font.3F

I understand moving to new APIs is unavoidable, but wouldn't there be a way to still support opening correctly old documents? E.g. automatically converting Wingdings characters in the ASCII range to Unicode PUA when opening the document. Interoperability with MS Word is a big deal, and with this change LO is losing some of the gains of the work that has been put into fixing small issues when opening .doc and .docx files.
Comment 1 Adolfo Jayme Barrientos 2014-11-22 22:45:44 UTC
Reducing priority since the issue is not in our code and is limited to OS X.
Comment 2 Milan Bouchet-Valat 2014-11-23 09:45:25 UTC
(In reply to Adolfo Jayme from comment #1)
> Reducing priority since the issue is not in our code and is limited to OS X.

I'm not sure the piece of code where the issue is matters a lot. :-) The questions is: are LO users affected or not.

But I agree this is relatively minor (though it is a clear regression).
Comment 3 Robinson Tryon (qubit) 2015-12-10 01:26:37 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 4 eisa01 2016-11-06 17:55:24 UTC
This works for me, test file shows a book in both cases and I can insert new book by typing &

Version: 5.2.3.3
Build ID: d54a8868f08a7b39642414cf2c8ef2f228f780cf
CPU Threads: 2; OS Version: Mac OS X 10.12; UI Render: default; 
Locale: en-US (en_NO.UTF-8); Calc: group