I have a clean install of Ubuntu 16.04 which had LibreOffice included. In some of the warning dialogs I get a strange unreadable font or font scaling. I have not explicitly made any changes to the standard install. Its possible that the font is missing or corrupted. How can I repair this problem?
I have the same problem. It has been repoted as a bug there; https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati/+bug/1575000
Their suggestion is to install an older version of libre office.
@Mavruk Thanks for the reference. I see that a future release may have this fixed. Since we won’t deploy this version for 2 months on the machines I am setting up I may just wait for an update.
As a workaround, try to mark a part of the unreadable text and it will be re-drawn in a proper font. I found this out by accident when I tried to copy the text and paste it into another text editor. It works for me (Kubuntu 16.04.1 and Libreoffice Writer Version: 5.1.4.2, Build ID: 1:5.1.4-0ubuntu1
Start LibreOffice, go to Tools, select Options…, then go to View, check the box Use OpenGL for all rendering (on restart), close Libreoffice and start it again. This solved the issue for me.
If for any reason your system becomes slow(er) after you activate OpenGL and your computer has an AMD GPU (AMD Graphics Processing Unit), it is likely that your system is affected by this bug. In such case, see this comment for instructions on how to upgrade your Linux kernel to a more recent stable version.
Note: such kernel upgrade instructions apply to *Ubuntu (Ubuntu, XUbuntu, KUbuntu…) 16.04, only. They might be useful for Mint users, too, but if your system is older (e.g. 14.04) or if it’s a different distro (Arch, Fedora, Slackware…) then you’re still encouraged to upgrade your Linux kernel but the kernel upgrade steps will be different and you should look for help on your distro’s forum.