Connector text box disappearing (becoming invisible)

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#1

Under certain conditions in Draw, when I create two shapes, then a connector between them and then add text to that connector, as soon as I leave the text box focus (click somewhere else), the text disappears. If I click on the connector again and start typing text, the text box shows up again and the text I initially entered is still there. So the text is not being erased, it is simply becoming invisible.

I can only speculate that this has something to do with spacing or something like that, which causes the text box to be pushed into “the void” somehow. I tried a bunch of things, such as reducing the font size considerably and formatting the text to align it with the top or bottom of the connector. Nothing helps. This is really annoying. Does anyone know why this is happening or what I am doing wrong?

I am unable to reproduce this error in a fresh sheet, so it must be something I did that caused this to happen. Any hints or suggestions are appreciated.

EDIT: So I just noticed, when I click on the connector and go to “Format” → “Text attributes…” and choose “Text Anchor” to be the top-center, center-center, or bottom-center, the text becomes visible again. Anchoring anywhere to the left or right. Causes the issue. While I now found a way to make the text visible again, it is still incredibly annoying that I cannot anchor it anywhere else. And the question still stands: Why does the text just become invisible with other anchoring settings?

EDIT 2: Attempting to create a minimal file to showcase the behavior I stumbled into something else. Now the text on another connector just becomes super tiny for some bewildering reason. I set the default to 12 pt and on the “disappearing” text box it stays that way, but on the other it turns into 2 pt (!) size text. And if I try to manually change it back to 12 pt, that has no effect. See the my uploaded example file. :face_with_spiral_eyes:

The downward arrow shows the disappearing text. It appears when you change the anchor to something centered (see my first edit). The left-pointing arrow shows the strange font sizing behavior.

OS: Arch Linux (Kernel version 6.2.1)
Libreoffice Version: 7.5.0
File type: ODF Drawing (.odg)
Example: disappearing_textbox.odg (13.4 KB)

#2

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#3

It looks like there is some “auto-size” effect on the connector label and this seems to be unique to connectors (I couldn’t get it on lines).

Since a connector is rather complex (it is made of several segments), the label is not attached to the connector itself but the bounding rectangle. When I move your “A” lozenge, the connectors take various shapes and the Yes/No labels shrink when the segment interact with them. When the rectangle degenerates to a line, the label may either disappear, or suddenly expand to some tiny size and be shown on the connector.

Considering the results of my experiment on your file, I’d recommend not to anchor the label elsewhere than center-center because in some position of the A lozenge both labels overlap since the anchor points of the bounding rectangle coincide.

But even with center-center, behaviour is not perfect. It seems connectors are always considered 3-segments (even curved connectors) and when the middle segment degenerates, the problem reappears.

I tried to define a specific style for the connector where I forced a font size but this has no effect on the label which size is still auto-determined by Draw.

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#4

If I assign the drawing style “Default Drawing Style” to the label object “Yes”, the effect no longer occurs.

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