Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 14854
Unicode titles not supported in bibliography
Last modified: 2005-10-10 13:12:30 UTC
I tried to enter into my bibliographic database a title with mixed Hebrew and English. The Hebrew appeared OK on the screen to start with, but when I move to another record and back to this one the Hebrew is replaced with question marks. Tried the same with some Greek and some Turkish - same problem with non-ASCII characters except that Turkish dotless i turns into euro symbol. It looks as if the bibliography is working only with the default code page. Possible link to issue 9441.
DL->AMA: Could you please takeover?
Oliver, what about Unicode in the bibliographic database?
The bibliography installed by default is dbase. If you need Unicode support you have to create a new data source with a database that supports it and use it in the bibliography.
In that case this is both a documentation issue and an example of misadvertising (one which would be illegal if this produt were sold!). OpenOffice is advertised as supporting Unicode and there is no mention in the documentation as far as I can see that this database uses any third party product or anything which is not Unicode compatible. Please advise me differently or I shall make public statements that OpenOffice is not Unicode compatible despite its claims.
Calm down! There's nothing illegal here. No misadvertising. It may be that it's a documentation issue as you are not informed that you need to use a different data source to be able to insert almost all UNICODE characters at once. The bibliography data is provided as an example. To make it as easy as possible it's in dbase format. This format does not support UNICODE. That doesn't mean Openoffice.org doesn't support UNICODE. Take a look into the dialog Tools/Data sources. Read the help pages that relate to this dialog. You have a lot of choices including the use of a spreadsheet as data source so you're not forced to install a third party product. You can also use a dbase table with the correct character set applied for the language you need.
Well, thanks for the clarification. Not so much misadvertising as inadequate documentation. And perhaps a bug that OpenOffice allows you to type into fields characters which cannot be saved. I am glad to see this list of options which I had not seen before, I had thought that there was only one format for the bibliographic database. I note that several of the options, not just dbase, offer only the same list of 8-bit encodings offered for dbase. But I am glad to hear that the spreadsheet should work for this - though I haven't tested it yet.. I might have expected this to be the default. As for your "You can also use a dbase table with the correct character set applied for the language you need." - this works only for a certain number of languages using the code pages listed, which excludes almost all Asian languages. It also excludes almost all mixed language text unless one of the languages is strict ASCII only e.g. you can't mix French or German with Hebrew or Arabic. If the dbase format can support all of these code pages it shouldn't be hard to get it to support Unicode in UTF-8. But maybe that is not as OpenOffice issue.
Peter, from the notes it looks like your main problem has been resolved. You can always file an new issue, or better yet, contribute some notes to the documentation project on your experiences.
Problem was clarified and resolved.
JA: closing this issue as worksforme and adding Frank Peters to CC list to notify him about documenting this
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*** Issue 55460 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***