Bug: LO Writer disappears text in some documents

[jeepmeep]

I’m using LO 26.2.1.2 on Ubuntu (Flatpak). I’m having a problem where Writer disappears text, usually when I open certain documents from the filesystem (Nautilus). Looks like this:

The text is there, as you can tell by the red-underline spellcheck warnings. The text color does not seem to be the issue, since changing the text color does not fix the issue. The main thing that fixes the issue is closing the file and reopening it from the LO Writer Open… dialog. To summarize:

To recreate: Open file from file system. (Or, sometimes, the text randomly disappears while I’m using the document.) This happens in both .docx and .odt files.

To fix: Reopen the file from the LO Open… dialog. Often works, but not today.

Is this documented? Are there any ways to fix this from my end? It’s rather tedious.

[mariosv]

Please test with Menu>Help>Restart in Safe Mode.

[jeepmeep]

Unfortunately the problem persists in Safe Mode.

[EarnestAl]

Can you please upload a sample document in which the text has disappeared?

[jeepmeep]

07 Chapter 6 - Agriculture_ES.docx (333.5 KB)
Here is one document that, when opened from the file system, sometimes loads with invisible text. See screenshot:

[ajlittoz]

Opens nice under my Fedora 43, KDE Plasma desktop with LO 25.8.6.2.

Could it be related to your dark OS theme? What happens if you change for a light theme in the OS (and in LO)?

I found you have a lot of direct formatting, notably forcing font colour. Doing so disables completely automatic self-adaptation to themes. Unfortunately, your document is DOCX and you can’t manage such issue with character styles because they don’t exist in this format (reverting to direct formatting).

[jeepmeep]

As I mentioned, I’m on 26.2.1.2 (Flatpak), Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (GNOME). LO25 did not have this problem for me (edit: but LO25 was not flatpak–I forget, it was either snap or ubuntu repository. I upgraded because I needed to export to markdown). I should have mentioned, switching to light theme does not affect it, and trying all the different LO themes and appearance settings have not fixed it. Using direct formatting to switch the font color to “Automatic” does not affect it.

When the document opens, the text is visible for a flash then disappears. And, as I mentioned above, the text has sometimes just disappeared while I’m working in a document. This suggests that something is happening after open and during use. And opening the document from the LO Open… dialog, instead of the filesystem, usually solves the problem. What is different about how files are handled when launched from the file system launcher as opposed to the native Open dialog?

This particular document is a DOCX export from Google Docs. I agree those files are incredibly sloppy on styles and formatting. But this has also happened on files I created directly in LO Writer and saved as ODT. I will try to find one of those files. This is a pretty inconsistent behavior except on certain documents.