A funny thing happened today. While writing (and a bit of copy-pasting) a paragraph with Bengali and English text in Openoffice writer (on Fedora 8), the bengali text vanished. Only the punctuation marks and the english text remained. The bengali text reappeared when I selected the text and chose Lohit Bengali as the fonts to be used. Two points to be noted here:
@ I was using the English interface of Openoffice writer i.e. LANG=en_US.UTF-8 oowriter
@ The default fonts of choice in the oowriter English interface is “Liberation Sans”
I could reproduce the problem a number of times by choosing a variety of other fonts. Not all were bad and some neatly displayed the text in Bengali as well, i.e. used Lohit Bengali irrespective of the selection of fonts. e.g. dejavu sans
A screenshot of the error follows.
(Click on the image for a larger version)
The top half of the text with the haphazard punctuation marks (and some english text) is when the bengali and english text portions are displayed with Liberation Sans as the choice of fonts
The bottom half of the text with both bengali and english contents is the correct display with Dejavu Sans as the choice of fonts.
The problem might be with the font rules and/or the rendering engine used by oowriter thats unable to select the glyphs from the appropriate font as per the contents.
OpenOffice package version: openoffice.org-writer-2.3.0-6.7.fc8
Looks like there is a bug for this as well.
Through Myopic Eyes 