Libre Office quitting

Seamas_O_Brogain · November 12, 2011, 8:47pm

I wonder if anyone can shed any light on a peculiar (but serious!)
problem that I’ve had all day.

Libre Office (on Ubuntu 11.10) constantly quits without warning. It
happens sometimes when I use certain keys, such as page up and page
down, or backspace or delete, or when I copy and paste text, or
sometimes when I‘m doing nothing. It never goes for more than two or
three minutes without quitting.

I changed the language settings; I changed keyboard layouts; I saved one
document as plain text (.txt) and reopened it in Libre Office; I did a
search for rogue characters ([\x0000-\x0008] and [\x000B-\x001F]), in
case that could cause the problem. I even purged and reinstalled Libre
Office, but to no avail.

On the other hand, I did try opening and changing other documents,
without any problem. Could there be a fault connected only with one or
two particular documents? If so, what can it be? Everything was working
perfectly yesterday, and I don’t recall doing anything in particular
today that could have created the problem.

planas · November 13, 2011, 8:33pm

Seamas

I wonder if anyone can shed any light on a peculiar (but serious!)
problem that I’ve had all day.

Libre Office (on Ubuntu 11.10) constantly quits without warning. It
happens sometimes when I use certain keys, such as page up and page
down, or backspace or delete, or when I copy and paste text, or
sometimes when I‘m doing nothing. It never goes for more than two or
three minutes without quitting.

I changed the language settings; I changed keyboard layouts; I saved one
document as plain text (.txt) and reopened it in Libre Office; I did a
search for rogue characters ([\x0000-\x0008] and [\x000B-\x001F]), in
case that could cause the problem. I even purged and reinstalled Libre
Office, but to no avail.

On the other hand, I did try opening and changing other documents,
without any problem. Could there be a fault connected only with one or
two particular documents? If so, what can it be? Everything was working
perfectly yesterday, and I don’t recall doing anything in particular
today that could have created the problem.

I assume you are using LO 3.4.3 from the repositories and the Unity desktop. Also, which module does this occur in?

I have not seen this behavior with LO with Ubuntu 11.10 with Gnome 3 desktop using Writer, Calc, and Base. Note, I do not normally use page up or page down.

I did not pay attention to the Ubuntu updates to note what was being updated.

Seamas_O_Brogain · November 13, 2011, 10:08pm

Hello, Jay.

I should have said that it’s in Writer only. I’m using Libre Office
3.4.3 (build 302), from the Ubuntu repository. I’m using Gnome Classic,
not Unity (and on a fairly dated computer).

Today was a disaster, but also may have led to a discovery. Having tried
everything else, I resorted to purging Libre Office altogether from my
computer and reinstalling from scratch. Same problem.

Going on the supposition that the problem was specific to a particular
document, I reconstructed the complex document I was working on,
starting with a new layout, styles, and all the components copied from
various places. That took me most of the day (and I’m not finished yet).
Everything seemed to be working properly now; then, when I copied in the
text from one particular file (a .docx file that I received from someone
else), the problem began again.

I noticed what seemed to be a space at the end of each paragraph (which,
incidentally, is a very common feature of Microsoft files copied into
Open Office or Libre Office). Now, though, the application would quit
every time I tried to delete one by backspacing over it or using the
delete key. After many failures I managed to get rid of them all (I
hope) by selecting “cut” from the menu, or pasting other text over the
mystery space.

I saved one of these characters and pasted it into Character Map to see
if I could identify it (and so be able to search for it in the future),
but it won’t allow me to paste it in.

If this is the source of the problem (and of course I don’t know for
certain that it is) I would hardly expect an application to quit because
of the presence a particular invisible character.

That’s today’s episode of the saga!

Steve_Edmonds · November 13, 2011, 10:24pm

Hi.
When you paste from the docx, can you try "paste special", unformatted
text and gain success.
Can you paste the text from docx into a file, save and view it with
ghexedit to identify the character.
You might be able to paste the character in here to find some info.
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/search.htm?q=ɬ&preview=entity

steve

NoOp · November 13, 2011, 11:22pm

Perhaps you're running into this bug:

<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42639>
[EDITING: Writer crashes on copy and pasting]
Note: I've not tried to replicate (yet).

NoOp · November 13, 2011, 11:32pm

...

Perhaps you're running into this bug:

<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42639>
[EDITING: Writer crashes on copy and pasting]
Note: I've not tried to replicate (yet).

I just tested and added to the bug report:

Confirmed w/LO 3.4.4 (linux - deb build):
LibreOffice 3.4.4
OOO340m1 (Build:402)

Works w/LO 3.3.4 (linux - deb build):
LibreOffice 3.3.4
OOO330m19 (Build:401)
tag libreoffice-3.3.4.

So this appears to be a another regression between 3.3.4 and 3.4.x.

Can anyone remind me how to get an strace w/LO?

planas · November 13, 2011, 11:38pm

Seamus

Hello, Jay.

I should have said that it’s in Writer only. I’m using Libre Office
3.4.3 (build 302), from the Ubuntu repository. I’m using Gnome Classic,
not Unity (and on a fairly dated computer).

Today was a disaster, but also may have led to a discovery. Having tried
everything else, I resorted to purging Libre Office altogether from my
computer and reinstalling from scratch. Same problem.

Going on the supposition that the problem was specific to a particular
document, I reconstructed the complex document I was working on,
starting with a new layout, styles, and all the components copied from
various places. That took me most of the day (and I’m not finished yet).
Everything seemed to be working properly now; then, when I copied in the
text from one particular file (a .docx file that I received from someone
else), the problem began again.

I noticed what seemed to be a space at the end of each paragraph (which,
incidentally, is a very common feature of Microsoft files copied into
Open Office or Libre Office). Now, though, the application would quit
every time I tried to delete one by backspacing over it or using the
delete key. After many failures I managed to get rid of them all (I
hope) by selecting “cut” from the menu, or pasting other text over the
mystery space.

Thanks for the observation. If you find more information please append/submit a bug report. You might try opening the problematic docx file by itself in Write when you get a chance and see what happens.

Murray_White · November 13, 2011, 11:53pm

I have been unable to find a method of doing a search for a page when using Writer. I also have Works and it was possible to do that. Anyone know if I'm missing something or is it just not possible. TIA

MW

drodriguez · November 13, 2011, 11:56pm

I have been unable to find a method of doing a search for a page when using Writer. I also have Works and it was possible to do that. Anyone know if I'm missing something or is it just not possible. TIA

did you try the Navigator (F5)??

NoOp · November 14, 2011, 12:01am

Please start a *new* thread rather than hijacking this one ("libre
Office quitting). To do that start a new message instead of using
another & then just changing the subject. See:
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette#Threading

Thanks.

Tom_Davies · November 14, 2011, 6:17am

Hi
This guide might help?
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/BugReport#How_to_get_strace_log_.28on_Linux.29
It's beyond me but hopefully makes sense.
Regards from
Tom

Murray_White · November 14, 2011, 6:43am

Thanks for the input NoOP. Was not aware that one had to start and use NEW as I would have thought that the listserv would pick things up from the subject line as all else was deleted.
Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case so I thank you for your assistance.

BTW -- hopefully there is not an issue anymore. I'd certainly not like to have to always be asking for info when normally I can find it myself but I find that the help files don't seem to give explanations of the various aspects of LO and I normally try to use HELP whenever possible. If there is a source of info that is available to learn about all the items available in LO I'd appreciate to know about it and its location.

MW

Tom_Davies · November 14, 2011, 7:14am

Hi
I sometimes use a plain-text editor to paste things into before moving them on into another app. It either strips weird coding or displays it so i can see the weirdness and delete bits. It would be nicer if it was easier to just copy&paste without stuffing everything up. The method of pasting unformatted text is quite neat too but using an intermediary can be interesting.
Regards from
Tom

Dotan_Cohen · November 14, 2011, 5:15pm

I can confirm many LibreOffice 3.4.3 crashes in Kubuntu 11.10. Simply
resizing the window will crash it.

I will start to file bugs and I'll post them here. Triage them and
confrm. Thanks.

NoOp · November 14, 2011, 7:34pm

Hi
This guide might help?
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/BugReport#How_to_get_strace_log_.28on_Linux.29
It's beyond me but hopefully makes sense.
Regards from
Tom

....
Thanks! That's exactly what I was looking for.