[Solved] Vanishing Characters

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Oeconomist
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[Solved] Vanishing Characters

Post by Oeconomist »

After an OS up-date, OpenOffice Math no longer renders various characters in formulæ.

I was running OO 3.2.1 on RHEL 5.5, I am now running OO 3.2.1 on RHEL 6.0.

The missing characters include U+223b, U+227b, U+227f, U+2280, and perhaps a few others. These continue to appear in the formula-editing pane (as ‘⊳’, ‘≻’, &c ), but now not in the ordinary document-display pane.

I have documents with literally hundreds of formulæ containing one or more of these characters, so editing the catalog and then replacing each instance of these characters with “%succ%” or somesuch would be very time-consuming and likely to leave behind missed points of replacement. (And I suspect that doing this would undermine OO-to-LAΤΕΧ conversion.)

My thought is that, previously, Math was using some font unknown to me, but that this font is no longer installed after the OS up-date. Since I did not previously explicitly select a font for these characters, I'm unable to recognize what font I could install to make these characters again visible.
Last edited by Oeconomist on Wed Nov 17, 2010 3:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.
OpenOffice 3.21 on REL 6.0 on i686
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Robert Tucker
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Re: Vanishing Characters

Post by Robert Tucker »

Oeconomist wrote:Since I did not previously explicitly select a font for these characters, I'm unable to recognize what font I could install to make these characters again visible.
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode ... upport.htm
LibreOffice 7.x.x on Arch and Fedora.
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Oeconomist
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Re: Vanishing Characters

Post by Oeconomist »

Thank you for that quick reply, Mr Tucker. None of the fonts on that list is the one that was being used. (I did some extensive experimentation.)

Is there a way of telling Math (or OpenOffice more generally) that, when it does not find a character in one font-file, it is to make a replacement from a specifc other font-file? Can it be told to do this so that the rendering of preëxisting formulæ is globally changed?

If not that, is there a way of telling OO to globally change the font used in the preëxisting formulæ of a document?
OpenOffice 3.21 on REL 6.0 on i686
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Oeconomist
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Re: Vanishing Characters

Post by Oeconomist »

Okay, I need to kill this thread. I thank everyone who pondered the problem, and especially Mr Tucker.

Further experimentation indicates that this is a new issue in RHEL 6.0, not a problem for OpenOffice itself.
OpenOffice 3.21 on REL 6.0 on i686
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RoryOF
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Re: [Resolved] Vanishing Characters

Post by RoryOF »

Unless you know to the contrary, it might be worth trying the Oracle version of OOo from www.openoffice.org.
Apache OpenOffice 4.1.15 on Xubuntu 22.04.4 LTS
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Oeconomist
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Re: [Resolved] Vanishing Characters

Post by Oeconomist »

RoryOF—

The failure to display these characters extends to .PDFs views with Document Viewer; I can literally copy-and-paste from the areas on the PDF where the characters should appear, into the window or pane of an app that ignores fonts as such, and the character is visible.

So something has gone south with the system UI. :|

Anyway, thanks, though, for the suggestion.
OpenOffice 3.21 on REL 6.0 on i686
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