How do I turn off emoji (missized, gaudy, wrong-coloured characters)?

[nomadmikz]

I’ve always used the unicode characters U+2610 Ballot Box (☐) and U+2611 Ballot Box with Check Unicode Character () to show ticked and unticked boxes in my documents, in Libre Office Writer and other tools. But since a recent update, Libre Office has been showing the latter as emoji, including in old documents. It’s a different size from the unticked box so it messes up the document formatting, and it adds colour I don’t want and looks unprofessional.

I’ve tried using different fonts, including looking up the font my browser is using to edit this text, which renders the normal way, so it seems unlikely that it’s the operating system messing it up. (Once it’s posted, though, I’m seeing the emoji version.) I’ve hunted around the format menu and Libre Office help. I’ve even tried pasting the appropriate Unicode variation selection into my document, but I still haven’t been able to get rid of these clown-like characters.

I need to get this documentation presentable next Monday, so it’s quite urgent.

Libre Office 6.4.7.2 under Mint 20 Cinnamon.

Thanks!

[mikekaganski]

@nomadmikz

since a recent update

…

@nomadmikz

Libre Office 6.4.7.2 under Mint 20 Cinnamon

This raises a question: recent update of what could that be? Because LibreOffice 6.4.7.2 was released on October 2020, almost 1.5 years ago; so it couldn’t be updated recently. If you had a recent update, which caused the problem, it must be something else - and that would likely be exactly a font, because there’s no automatic rule to replace ☑ (U+2611) with any emoji.

Maybe I’m wrong about not having a rule - you may look up for it in LibreOffice’s Tools|AutoCorrect|AutoCorrect Options; but I’d strongly suspect some font being substituted on your system, which wasn’t there before (or was updated to include the new colored glyph); so I’d suggest you to search for fonts on your system actually including the wanted glyph, using LibreOffice’s Insert|Special Character (but it has own glitches), or using an OS-provided tool.

[nomadmikz]

It actually turns out that I was using Open Office before. Once I realised this and went back to that, everything appeared normally. Thanks!

[Wanderer]

@nomadmikz

everything appeared normally.

Be careful, what you give away: If you print or create pdf, with embedded fonts you are safe, but if you give the Source-File out, your presentation may be viewd in LibreOffice - maybe with the same result you exprienced…

[nomadmikz]

Thanks. Yeah, I’m pretty used to thing rendering differently in different versions of MS-Word, etc., and especially on odd US paper sizes. So with all its faults, PDFs are what I tend to distribute.