Character encoding problem with mail merge?

[sclarckone]

Hello there,

I have a trouble with mail merge functionality of LibreOffice Writer and I think it might be related to a character encoding problem (though I’m not sure about it).

I’m using LibreOffice 4.0.2 (I’m not sure since I don’t have access to the machine right now but it’s 4.0.x for sure) on a GNU/Linux system with en_US.UTF-8 en_US.ISO-8859-1 locales installed.

I’d like to use the mail merge functionality to send a group of emails written in French (thus with diacritics).
It works like a charm excepted that it messes up with diacritics. They are displayed with wrong symbols just like it happens sometimes with web browsers and wrong character encoding.

Since I’m really not an expert I guess there is a character encoding related problem but I couldn’t say “where” exactly.

Should I have other locales installed on my system (the fr_FR ones) or is there a trouble with the mail merge function (since the diacritics are displayed correctly in Writer itself) ?

Thanks for your help !

[mahfiaz]

Where exactly the diacritics are, which show up wrong? Mail subject? Recipients? Mail body?

Could you attach source of one such email? (upload somewhere and give us a link or pastebin.com)

[sclarckone]

There is one diacritic in the subject (which is actually well displayed) and a lot of them in the mail body (which show up wrong).

Here you’ll find the email (I’ve removed mail addresses) : http://pastebin.com/5cxWrD1D.
I don’t have access to the source right now but it’s the same as the mail body.

[bencomp]

The application creating the email message is (most likely) the source of the problem, because that is where the encoding is set. An email server usually does not alter the email encoding.

In a test using LibreOffice 4.2 (on Windows 7 with locale set to Dutch (Netherlands)) I could replicate the problem. A short email message with diacritics sent as plain text (using Gmail) had no problem, but when I sent the same message as an HTML came out with garbled characters in both the HTML part and plain text alternative.

This appears to be a bug, fdo#70796 reports this issue for Greek characters and notes it has been resolved, but it clearly has not fully been fixed in 4.2.4.2.