Public bug reported:
LibreOffice 6.0.7 on Ubuntu 18.04, with English (UK) locales selected
and running LXDE, reacts to paragraphs of Traditional Chinese text being
pasted into LibreOffice Writer by searching the system for a Chinese
font and selecting it for the pasted Chinese text. Unfortunately, if
the package "texlive-full" is installed on the system (which includes
texlive-lang-chinese), then the first Chinese font LibreOffice
encounters will be "AR PL SungtiL GB" from the fonts-arphic-gbsn00lp
package. This font includes only a subset of Chinese characters (it is
a "Simplified Chinese only" font), and if the text being pasted is
Traditional Chinese then it will almost certainly contain other
characters not present in the "AR PL SungtiL GB" font. In this case a
font-fallback system selects a different font for just some of the
characters. If the font it falls back on happens to be "AR PL MingtiL"
then all is well, since those two fonts are designed to complement each
other stylistically. But our system had the "fonts-wqy-microhei"
package installed too (which was needed for WINE to run a Chinese CD-ROM
that couldn't use the Arphic fonts), and unfortunately the text pasted
into LibreOffice ended up using this "WenQuanYi Micro Hei" font as a
fallback for any character not present in the Simplified Chinese set,
whereas those characters that are present in the Simplified Chinese set
get the Arphic font. The end result is a paragraph of Chinese text that
keeps changing font every other word, and although the user was putting
up with it, her printouts were looking decidedly sloppy and were
apparently causing others to think Linux is an inferior system because
its Chinese printouts are so bad.
Since this particular user is unlikely to write old-style CJK-LaTeX, I
worked around the problem by removing the Arphic font packages from her
laptop (she can still use the rest of LaTeX, which is enough for her
most likely use-case of typesetting English scientific papers), so her
LibreOffice now finds the WenQuanYi font first, and that one supports
all Chinese characters (both Simplified and Traditional) so her Chinese
printouts now look much better (regardless of which type of Chinese is
being printed today).
Another workaround would be to ensure the user knows how to override
LibreOffice's choice of font after any Chinese text is pasted into a
LibreOffice document, but this is a chore that would have to be
remembered every time. I did try to find a configuration option in
LibreOffice to set it by default, but I was unable to find one that
worked (it does not work to override "Tools / Options / LibreOffice
Writer / Basic fonts", since these are not what gets applied when
Chinese text is pasted; it does not work to edit the default style via
Styles / Edit; there is nothing in Options about default Chinese font).
So I think we either need to make a feature request to LibreOffice to
implement a "default Chinese font" option (or "default font by
language"), or put some kind of special-case code into LibreOffice that
causes it to treat the Arphic fonts as lowest priority even though they
are listed under "A", or else address the font fallback system (if
LibreOffice is selecting Arphic Simplified because it's listed under "A"
then I'm not sure why the fallback system is not selecting Arphic
Traditional which is also listed under "A" but instead goes to a font
listed under "W"; either they're being arranged in some non-alphabetical
order or two different font-selection systems with different logic are
at play). I don't know if there's some way for the package maintainers
to kludge things so that Arphic is given lower priority by LibreOffice.
Or perhaps there is some other solution?
** Affects: libreoffice (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1885337
Title:
LibreOffice Writer selects inappropriate font when Traditional Chinese
text is pasted on system that also has TexLive installed
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