Chinese characters invisible in 3.2.1

ats · Red Pill Joined: Jul 18, 2009 Posts: 8

Dear Neooffice,

FYI, I have had to downgrade back to 3.1.2 due to a glitch in viewing Chinese characers in 3.2.1. Roman characters view fine in a document, but Chinese is invisible regardless of the text color or other formatting choices made. Interestingly, any text written invisibly shows up fine if you use quickview to view the document or export it as a PDF and then open it.

I look forward to the patch when it comes. Neo is a great product and literally the only one that fits my situation.

Macbook Pro, 10.6.8, inputting Chinese via IMKQIM

Regards,

Andrew Nugent-Head
President, Association for Traditional Studies
Chief Practitioner, Traditional Studies Chinese Medicine Clinic
andrewnh@traditionalstudies.org
www.traditionalstudies.org

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

I am not able to reproduce the problem that you see on my Mac OS X 10.6.8 machine.

Since NeoOffice 3.1.2 works for you but NeoOffice 3.2.1 does not, I suspect that a specific font triggers the problem. This is because in NeoOffice 3.2 and higher, we stopped using Apple's now obsolete "ATSUI" functions for text layout and rendering and replaced those functions with Apple's newer "CoreText" functions.

Can you tell us which font or fonts you are using that do not work with NeoOffice 3.2.1?

Patrick

sardisson · Town Crier Joined: Feb 01, 2004 Posts: 4588

You should also use Font Book to disable any corrupt or duplicate fonts and see if that resolves the problem.

Also, can you attach a sample document that exhibits this problem?

Smokey

ats · Red Pill Joined: Jul 18, 2009 Posts: 8

Dear All,

Thank you for the suggestions and concerns. I have finally loaded 3.2.1 onto a separate machine and repeated the error. It seems to be connected to inputting Chinese in a Text Box as opposed to inputting it into a document directly. Chinese becomes invisible when creating a text box either in writing or drawing mode.

I tested the vertical text box, not the horizontal due to time constraints. I did not test all fonts, but did test Biaukai, kai, STFangsong. I repeated the error on my machine on two other laptops. Again, the characters are invisible when looking at the document, but are actually there when printing or printing to pdf.

Hope this helps finding the bug! If you still cannot repeat the error, I will upload files.

Andrew

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

ats · Red Pill Joined: Jul 18, 2009 Posts: 8

I am attaching a file, which is the stationery we use for writing a chinese herbal formula. The middle of the page is actually a large text box with first text in the upper right corner. The character already inside is there and visible, but when you either add characters or change its size, it goes invisible.

I have reproduced it on a macbook using the Apple Chinese input system and on my MacBook Pro using IMQIM, a much more intelligent input method. If you are still unable to reproduce it, I will load 3.2.1 back onto my machine and spend some time looking at it. Everything was designed in earlier Neo versions and works fine in 3.1.9 and earlier versions.

Regards,
Andrew

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

Thank you for the sample document. I can know reproduce the bug on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

What I noticed is that when printing the text is shifted to the left and downward which tells me that the text is there in the document, but the NeoOffice is drawing it in the wrong location.

Since this bug does not occur on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, I suspect that Snow Leopard is returning different glyph location and dimension info than Leopard.

I have created bug 3665 to track this bug. I will investigate this bug and when I have a fix, I will post a test patch for you to try.

Patrick

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

I think that I have fixed this bug. After some Google searching, I found that other applications have found that Apple's CTFontGetVerticalTranslationsForGlyphs() function returns strange values on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard but returns normal values on both Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and 10.7 Lion.

You did not see this bug in NeoOffice 3.1.2 because that version of NeoOffice uses Apple's older, obsolete text layout functions. Back in March 2011, in NeoOffice 3.2 we moved to Apple's newer CoreText functions. Fortunately, fixing this bug was simply multiple the Snow Leopard values by the applicable scaling factor.

Can you install the following test patch and tell us if the bug is fixed for you?:

Intel:
http://joe.neooffice.org/test/NeoOffice-3.2.1-Patch-0-Test-4-Intel.dmg

Patrick

ats · Red Pill Joined: Jul 18, 2009 Posts: 8

Dear Patrick et al,

Thank you for the fast response and bug fix. Chinese now shows correctly in various font sizes and colors. I look forward to exploring 3.2.1 now that I am able to work in it.

As to text shifting, LibreOffice seems to do a similar thing: when working in vertical Chinese (same file I attached), text does not disappear, but the left quarter is often visually missing and when highlighting, only part of the character is visually highlighted. Resizing or moving to the next line fixes the problem, but it makes it unusable software for our needs.

Regards and thank you again,

Andrew

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

FYI. After I posted a test patch for the bug that you found, I found bug 3666 and bug 3667 on Mac OS X 10.7.

To make sure that I did not break any Asian font rendering or export to PDF functionality, can you install the following test patch and tell us if the bug that you found is still fixed for you?

Intel:
http://joe.neooffice.org/test/NeoOffice-3.2.1-Patch-0-Test-6-Intel.dmg

Patrick

ats · Red Pill Joined: Jul 18, 2009 Posts: 8

Dear Patrick,

I am glad to help. Hopefully I will be able to tackle it this weekend or early next week. Will there be a fast way to uninstall the patch if it does render Asian text unreadable? Otherwise I would have to delete 3.2.1 from the system, then re-install it from the dmg then re-install 'patch 0'.

Regards,
Andrew

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

From your worry about breakage, I think that I was not clear about what the latest test patch changes. Unpatched, NeoOffice will not render or export to PDF most Asian fonts on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. I only added code to handle that so you should see no change on earlier versions of Mac OS X.

My assumption was that you were using some Lion machines and that NeoOffice was already broken on those machines so the risk from installing the test patch on those machines is essentially nil.

Patrick

ats · Red Pill Joined: Jul 18, 2009 Posts: 8

Dear Patrick,

Thank you for the clarification. We have 5 machinese running 10.6.8 until developers for 10.7 have worked out all the bugs. We can't afford the down time due to teaching and patient care.

let me know if there is anything else I can do

Andrew

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

FYI. I have included the fix for this bug in NeoOffice 3.2.1 Patch 1. You can download the patch from the NeoOffice 3.2.1 patch download page.

Patrick