Issue with recent request for Russian font?

users
#1

I've been working with some data recently, and have run across a long delay
with no response, and then a message pops up that LibreOffice wants to
install a Russian font. I can then close, and it continues fine. If I tell it to go
ahead, I eventually get a message that it can not find the font?

I'm not doing anything that I think would need a Russian font, or where I
might go to get a Russian font, or how to have it never ask to install a
Russian font?

#2

Hi.
Did you use the Libreoffice package from the Libreoffice website.
I use builds for OpenSUSE and have had this with wanting to install Indonesian or something.

I just ignored it and since my latest update it doesn't happen any more so assume it was something to do with the person who built the packages.
Steve

#3

I should add that with the newest 5.2.3.2 build I have seen messages pop up
stating something like "Automatic installation of fonts is not supported at
this time."

As the others did, I just ignored it, but it sounds like it's related to
what they saw.

#4

I had a 5.2.3.x version, but just updated to 5.2.4.2, and it still pops up
with the message about needing the Russian font. Even tried to set a font
Replacement table for Russian to be replaced with Liberation Sans, but it
still comes up.

Select format cell, and it comes up.
<http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/file/n4203543/russian.png>

#5

did an strace with libreoffice calc, and in an empty spreadsheet did the
format cell, and got the message about the Russian font. Closed, and looked
in the out1 file ( 1>out1).

** (soffice:19050): DEBUG: InstallFontconfigResources method failed
** (soffice:19050): DEBUG: InstallFontconfigResources problem : did not
agree to search

Didn't see anything involving fonts in the larger out2 file ( 2>out2).

Perhaps someone with more specific knowledge could identify why it failed,
and perhaps how to make it not fail?

Thanks.

#6

Dear Mike,

I don't know about your specific problem, but long experience makes me very suspicious of any font whose name is simply the name of a language, e.g. "RUSSIAN.TTF", "GREEK.TTF", "HEBREW.TTF" etc.

That's a real alarm-bell. It usually indicates an old 8-bit font dating from before the days of Unicode, often in an encoding that wasn't a standard 8-bit encoding even then. In other words, it probably has the Russian characters where the Latin alphabet should be.

If the text that you're struggling with is in one of those fonts, then changing the Replacement table won't improve things much: at best, you'll just get a load of Latin characters instead of Russian ones.

Such problems have little or nothing to do with LibreOffice. They are caused by having text that was originally made in non-standard fonts. As long as the non-standard fonts are present on the system, the text will appear correctly, but if the text is transferred to a system that only uses standard Unicode fonts (which is a consummation devoutly to be wished), then that text can't be displayed as originally written.

There are work-arounds, but the only real remedy is to convert that text into Unicode. If you're stuck, I have some macros that might help. Unfortunately, they only work in MS Word. :frowning:

However, if you send me the text, I'll see if I can convert it.

Best wishes,

Alec McAllister
Multilingual Computing Co-ordinator
I.T. (formerly Information Systems Services)
University of Leeds
Leeds
West Yorkshire
LS2 9JT
t.a.mcallister@leeds.ac.uk
Parkinson Building, Room 240, tel 0113 343 3573
Fairburn House extension, Room 2.08, tel 0113 343 8773

Medieval Unicode Font Initiative: http://folk.uib.no/hnooh/mufi/

Personal Webpage: http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~ecl6tam/