Issue 124202

Such squares often indicate missing glyphs in the used font. Please do this:
- Mark the text area and assign the font "DejaVu Sans". Do you now see true characters?
- Set cursor in the heading and right-click, item "Edit paragraph style". Goto tab "Font" and look, which font is shown there. Goto tab "Organize" and look at the information in the lower part. Which font is mentioned there (if at all).
- Goto menu Tools > Options > OpenOffice Writer > Basic Fonts (CTL). Which font is selected for headings?

Then have a look whether these found fonts are really installed on your machine and whether these found have glyphs for the characters.

i have just noticed what the true problem are, the issue happens when i try to "italic" any Arabian word

Open Office 4.2 AOO420m1(Build:9800)  -  Rev. 1692551
The test file used is a bit of text from the Arabic Wikipedia article on ants. https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%86%D9%85%D9%84

Overall I managed to replicate the bug and find a variety of other failure related to highlighting Arabic. Note that the document I am using is in Saudi Arabian Arabic, with a DejaVu Sans font of size 14 to correspond with the screenshots provided.

The first test performed was simply to check if highlighting the text and making it have a header style would cause the error, I had no success in replicating the error this way. The steps are:

1)Open the test document with open office
2)Select the entire paragraph
3)Go to format and click on “Styles and Formatting” 
4)From this box select one by one all of the possible headings to see if bug occurs
5)On the far right of the screen click on the icon below the green cube to open the list of styles
6)With the text still selected, select each option one at a time to have the text switch to that style
7)Use the drop down list from the top left to select the available headings to switch the style of the text
*NOTE: I have attached a screenshot of the GUI components I used to change the heading

In response to the second claim, that it is just italicizing Arabic text that causes an issue I did managed to partially replicate the bug though much less catastrophically. The steps to replicate are:

1)Open the test document with open office
2)Select the entire paragraph
3)Italicize the paragraph through the large “I” on the top of the screen next to the underline and bold buttons.
4) There should appear a few white squares near the bottom of the text (See White Squares.png) 

In an effort to fully replicate the bug I performed a series of follow up tests. For each of the following tests I performed the steps being described, and then I would re-run the initial italicizing test.  

In the first follow up tests I changed the font from DejaVu Sans to other formats and found that the error would manifest itself differently for all other fonts. Instead of having certain characters turn into white squares the text appears to leave the margins (See Alternate Font.png).
 
I then attempted to change to the font size of the text and found that different sizes change the amount and location of squares (See Alternate Size.png).
 
I then attempted to replicate the steps again but this time change the language locale by going to the “Tools”, “Language”, “For all Text”, “More”. Then in “Locale setting” I changed it to one of the varieties of Arabic. This would change where and how many blank squares appeared on the screen (see Alternate Locale.png).

The only other bug that I found similar to the problems with the margins was this: https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=100940

Created attachment 85334 [details]
A screenshot of the basic failure

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White Squares

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Test File

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Alternate Font

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Alternate Size

Created attachment 85341 [details]
Alternate Locale

Environment: Windows 10 
Open Office 4.1.2 build: AOO412m3 (Build: 9782) - Rev. 1709699
Windows snapshot build 
Apache_OpenOffice_4.1.2_Win_x86_install_en-US_1709699

Text used to replicate the bug:
https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B2%D9%87%D8%B1%D8%A9_(%D9%86%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%AA)
Steps taken to replicate the original report of the bug

  1. Created a new document on open office 
  2. Copied few paragraphs from the wiki page and past to my document 
  3. Highlighted everything and made sure that the text is in "DejaVu Sans" font and size 14 
  4. Used the format drop down tool bar on top of the page to clear formatting 
  5. Selected “Format” dropdown at the very top of the page
  6. Selected Style and Format 
  7. Clicked on the heading formats that are provided 

I was unable to replicate the bug and get any square on my text in result of changing the format however I came across another formatting issue where the copied text would go out of the frame bound after applying step 4 (clear formatting) (see attachment)

In addition to the effort of replicating the bug report I have tried the following steps as well 

  1. Created a new document on open office 
  2. Copied few paragraphs from the wiki page and past to my document 
  3. Highlighted everything and made sure that the text is in "DejaVu Sans" font and size 14 
  4. Italicize the text  
  5. Used the format drop down tool bar on top of the page to clear formatting (see attachment)
  6. Selected “Format” dropdown at the very top of the page
  7. Selected Style and Format 
  8. Clicked on the heading formats that are provided 

In this additional test I came across the same problem where the text would go out of the frame bound but could not replicate the claimed bugs.
Few other tests that I ran in order to replicate the bug was to try different other fonts and see if the squares appeared depending on different fonts 

  1. Created a new document on open office 
  2. Copied few paragraph from provided wiki page 
  3. Highlighted everything and changed the formatting to heading 2 
  4. Changed the font to weddings 
  5. Changed the font to DejaVu Sans 

After trying the above steps I came across few black squares and that only happened if you first choice your formatting (Heading 2, Heading 3 and …) and then change the format to Webdings (see attachment)
There appeared few extra space between each character of an string in a stance after changing the format to DejaVu Sans (see attachment)

Overall the original claims could not be replicated, I’ve tried to follow each step and add few of my own and try different combination formatting and font selections. I was able to find few other bugs within the formatting and fonts when trying to use Arabic language in open office as they have been described and all the files and pictures have been attached and name accordingly.

Created attachment 85682 [details]
after

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before

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formatting issue pic

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formatting issue file

Created attachment 85686 [details]
out of margins file

Created attachment 85687 [details]
used to clear formatting

Created attachment 85688 [details]
webding font