Public bug reported:
In most fonts, many characters in the Arabic script change their width
and height as typing progresses. For example the letter ب (U+0628) is
reduced to about a half or even a third of its width if it's followed by
another character such as ا (U+0627): با. Usually LibreOffice
understands the changes in font metrics pretty well but not always.
See the attached screenshot where I've written the sentence "مرحبا يا
صديقي العزيز" in Writer and started selecting letters from the beginning
of the line. The selection shown in the screenshot looks like the whole
first word plus the following space but actually it only covers the
first 4 letters of the first word out of 5 total: مرحب. From a user's
point of view, this is very confusing, as I can't tell how far I've
already selected without counting the characters in my mind. Even more
surprisingly, LibreOffice Calc shows the selection as expected, i.e.
different from Writer, so this does not feel like a font problem per se,
although only some fonts display this behavior.
The font I'm using in this example is Scheherazade, available through a
third-party repository at packages.sil.org. The font is designed to
cover a very wide variety of characters used for Arabic-script minority
languages in both Asia and Africa, and in many cases it's the only
professionally made font available for people working on many of these
languages.
Description: Ubuntu 17.10
Release: 17.10
libreoffice-writer:
Installed: 1:5.4.6-0ubuntu0.17.10.1
Candidate: 1:5.4.6-0ubuntu0.17.10.1
Version table:
*** 1:5.4.6-0ubuntu0.17.10.1 500
500 http://mr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu artful-updates/main amd64
Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
1:5.4.5-0ubuntu0.17.10.5 500
500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu artful-security/main amd64
Packages
1:5.4.1-0ubuntu1 500
500 http://mr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu artful/main amd64 Packages
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.10
Package: libreoffice-writer 1:5.4.6-0ubuntu0.17.10.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.13.0-41.46-generic 4.13.16
Uname: Linux 4.13.0-41-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.7-0ubuntu3.8
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Mon May 21 21:03:43 2018
InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-02-13 (462 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" - Release amd64 (20161012.2)
ProcEnviron:
TERM=xterm-256color
PATH=(custom, no user)
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
LANG=fi_FI.UTF-8
SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: libreoffice
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to artful on 2017-11-05 (197 days ago)
** Affects: libreoffice (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
** Tags: amd64 apport-bug artful wayland-session
** Attachment added: "Screenshot selecting Arabic Writer.png"
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1772520/+attachment/5142584/+files/Screenshot%20selecting%20Arabic%20Writer.png
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1772520
Title:
Font metrics mixed up when selecting Arabic characters in Writer
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