PDF Export does not show italicized text

English
#28

Tried that. and followed instructions to fix the font cache, but I’m getting the same result… not happening all the time but sometimes I do have missing characters and the random 1’s.

2024-25 ESU MBB vs UNK.ods (291.4 KB)

2024-25 ESU MBB vs UNK.pdf (309.0 KB)

Honestly the problem is worse now than when the thread started. As you can see, there’s now missing text all over the document and the random characters weren’t appearing before.

Edit: Wanted to point out that I’ve experienced this error on my home PC and my laptop at work so it’s happening on multiple installations of LibreOffice.

#29

This might be helpful, you might need to experiment. In your exported pdfs, the text is still there, it is just in white text, this is important.
There is a difference in export between Merge and Centre and Merge. I copied merged cell AQ110:CX131 from your original sample to a new spreadsheet.

  • If I select the merged cell, select Format > Merge and Unmerge Cells > Unmerge Cells then click Format > Merge and Unmerge Cells > Merge and Centre Cells then select only the cell (highlighted) and export only the selection to pdf then the pdf has white text.
  • If I unmerge the cell and then with the selection still highlighted, I click Format > Merge and Unmerge Cells > Merge Cells then the exported pdf has black text

FontAttributesExportToPDF-2.ods (31.1 KB)

You could post a bug report, How to Report Bugs in LibreOffice - The Document Foundation Wiki

Remember that you usage is a bit unusual, most people would use Writer or Draw for your document

#30

I’m still not sure how that would explain the random '1’s that are appearing in the document whereever they appear.

Also, maybe the text is white in some of the boxes, but it is NOT there is several boxes - if the text is truly white and not missing, then it should show up in cells that have a non-white background and nothing does - just random '1’s (this can be seen in several exmples in the 2024-25 ESU MBB vs UNK.pdf). In fact, the rogue '1’s that are appearing (when they do) are almost exclusively NOT white - they are normally of the appropriate (correct) color for that cell (For example, see the merged cell that starts at CY102 labeled ‘Last Game - Thursday’ - the 1’s are NOT white… they are black. Also see the merged cell that begins with the top left corner at CP76 - the 1 is red, not white).

I will also say that in fooling around with it, I have gotten it to export correctly, but only when I have changed something in the document. (For example, in the merged cell labeled Last Game - Saturday on the right in the merged cell that begins in the top left corner at JC102, I changed ‘9-for-11’ to ‘9 of 11’, then tried to export again, and it exported correctly - it doesn’t seem to matter what gets changed or whether the cell that has the change is one that was incorrect before… only that a change was made).

In terms of most people using Writer or Draw, as someone who has been in the business for 16 years (and I know a lot of guys and have seen a lot of spotting boards), I can tell you that nobody uses a problem like Draw for these boards - the overwhelming majority use Excel or a spreadsheet program. There are guys who use MS Word for sure.

I can definitely try to unmerge every cell in the document and then remerge them (but NOT Merge & Center) but, as you can imagine, this will be pretty time-consuming in the middle of a busy season to attempt… I may save it for the offseason and try to limp along until then and post my results afterwards. It doesn’t seem like this would be the answer though as all of the cells that are using the Impact font are ALSO merged and centered - it would stand to reason that if PDF export didn’t work for merged and centered cells, ALL of my cells in the PDF would be blank or missing characters.

It seems to be a problem with Liberation Serif text that is colored or formatted in some way - plain black text seems to always export fine, but any text that has a color, bolding, italicized, or anything else is what gets left out.

I guess it is possible that Liberation Serif is just a bad font and I could try a different one…

If I have time, I will try those two things and report back… might be a while though as those charts unfortunately are not automated and they don’t build themselves!

EDIT: Really apologize for the text size - I tried to paragraph using “enter” like a sane person and Ask LIbreoffice just made it into a wall of text. Tried to insert a hyphen in between paragraphs to separate them for ease of reading and it made the text big and bolded… even though the bold is not selected in the edit window… perplexing to say the least.

#31

You will have to excuse me, I am working blind because your .ods exports to pdf fine for me.
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See if exporting to pdf from Safe Mode works OK, click Help > Restart in Safe Mode > Continue in Safe Mode. See this page for more information LibreOffice user profile - The Document Foundation Wiki

Or try with a temporary profile further down the page.

#32

Wanted to report back that I tried this and it didn’t help. There were some cells that were merged and centered missing text and there were others that I did ONLY used Merge Cells for and there was still italicized text missing.
2024-25 ESU WBB @ WU.ods (415.1 KB)
2024-25 ESU WBB @ WU.pdf (323.6 KB)
Note the cell labeled Notes & Superlatives on the left & bottom of the sheet that starts with the upper left corner at AQ110. That cell is NOT merged & centered. Conversely the one on the right I purposely left as merged and centered to experiment. As you can see there italicized text missing in both. You can find this cell in the bottom right of the sheet labeled as Notes & Superlatives and starts with the upper left corner at GU110.

#33

I tried this - no difference in my sample from today.

Same affected cells as previous post with similar output… I can add the file if you want but it looks identical to the 2024-25 ESU WBB @ WU.pdf I just posted…

Unless anybody has other ideas, I will likely report as a bug as you suggested earlier or hope that an new version fixes the issue. This didn’t start until this most recent update of LibreOffice.

#34

Did you try in LibreOffice Safe Mode?
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Until yesterday when LO automatically updated itself, my system was very similar to yours except that I had refused the optional update to Windows 11.
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That gives two possibilities, you have a corrupted user profile, or Windows 11 24H2 has some effect.
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You could

  • download a portable version of LibreOffice which shouldn’t conflict with your installed version and see if that exports correctly. Or
  • Install a parallel version, Installing in parallel on Windows - The Document Foundation Wiki and see if that exports correctly.
    .
    If it doesn’t then a bug report is needed. You can install an older version of LibreOffice by uninstalling LO and installing an earlier version that worked.
    .
    Version: 24.8.4.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
    Build ID: bb3cfa12c7b1bf994ecc5649a80400d06cd71002
    CPU threads: 8; OS: Windows 11 X86_64 (10.0 build 22631); UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
    Locale: en-NZ (en_NZ); UI: en-GB
    Calc: CL threaded
#35

Yes I did… there was still text missing.

I just got the new update.

Well, it has been happening on two different machines… outside of this issue with LibreOffice I don’t have any other issues with my Windows account that would be indicative of that as far as I’m aware (I’ve got quite a few things attached to it including OneDrive & Xbox so it isn’t something I am wanting to screw around with too much).

As far as Windows 11 24H2 goes, I’ve been on that build for a while without any LibreOffice issue. As I mentioned, this started popping up with the last LibreOffice release.

I am now on the new release (as of today) so I’ll give that a look when I do my next charts and see if that makes a difference. If not, probably off to a bug report as you previously suggested.

#36

I wanted to follow up here. After a while of using the latest version of the program (which got updated while this was occurring), I have not had these PDF conversion errors.

In fact on my computer at home, I converted and it formatted incorrectly but I remembered that I was on the old version still.

After updating and converting, it worked perfectly so it would appear that this issue does NOT occur with the current version of LibreOffice as of 1/31/2025. As I had never had the problem until the last build, it definitely feels like something bad got in there that wasn’t there before and it seems to have been fixed now.

Appreciate people who tried to help in the meantime.

#37

One other follow up… the issue has started occurring again… but it is intermittent.

Sometimes, if I try to reconvert the file, it will work on the second try.

Sometimes, if I change something in a cell (change two to 2 for example) and then try, it will work…

So, it isn’t perfect like it should be yet. Might report as bug when I have time as previously suggested.

#38

I’m having exactly the same issue. Sometimes(!) Italic texts do not appear in the PDF (Export to PDF function). This occurs in LibreOffice Calc 25.2.4.3, running on Windows 10 Pro. Font used: Arial.
I just took several hours to figure out why and when this happens, this post is the result of that, so I hope that someone can find and fix this nasty bug.
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Steps to reproduce, although its hard to reproduce, it seems very time sensitive and I’ve made the reproducible case as small as I could.
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Here is how I get this problem reproduced within 5 to 10 times of trying all of these steps:

  • Store the attachments on a UNC path (\\server\path\somewhere\...)
  • Close any LibreOffice app
  • Wait for 10 seconds
  • Open test5.ods
  • Wait for 10 seconds
  • Accept the message to read of data from the external file (linkeddata.ods)
  • Wait for 10 seconds
  • Use the Export to PDF button in the menu bar*
  • Inspect the exported PDF. (It shows as either test5-expected-result.pdf or test5-no-italic.pdf - the problem is visible in test5-no-italic.pdf)
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    (*) Make sure that in the “File->Export to PDF…” menu, these options these are set:
    image
    image733×478 33.4 KB

    I think “Gelabelde PDF” (Tagged PDF) is the important one, that must be enabled.
    Sorry its in Dutch. :wink:
    .
    What happens
    The output sometimes has no italic text in it, like the example file test5-no-italic.pdf. Whats interesting is if I copy-paste the entire PDF contents to a plain text editor (like notepad++), I do see that the italic texts are present in there.
    In some cases (not this specific test case) the italic texts are exported to the PDF, but doesn’t show Italic.
    .
    What should happen
    How the test5-expected-result.pdf looks is what should happen.
    .
    Screenshots
    I got this message from the forum:
Sorry, new users can only put one embedded media item in a post.

REALLY? I just took hours for researching this and then I get rejected like this…!?
I’ll try to post them in the next comment.
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Production
In my production I have somewhat larger files that fail like test5-no-italic.pdf almost 100% of the time after opening Calc.
When I un-italic these texts (so normal text) its working fine.
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Here are the attachments
linkeddata.ods (13.2 KB)
test5.ods (19.2 KB)
I got this message from the forum while trying to post 2 more attachments:

Sorry, new users can only put 2 links in a post.

REALLY? I just took hours for researching this and then I get rejected like this…!?
I’ll try to post them in the next comment.

#39

Screenshots
test5.ods

image
image974×253 28.2 KB

And some more files:
test5-expected-result.pdf (72.0 KB)
test5-no-italic.pdf (71.3 KB)

#40

test5-no-italic.pdf
image

I can’t post my fourth screenshot (from:test5-expected-result.pdf) because of stupid rules/limits here. You’d have to open it yourself.

Please remove these terrible limits from this forum:

Sorry, new users can only put one embedded media item in a post.
Sorry, new users can only put 2 links in a post.
We're sorry, but new users are temporarily limited to 3 replies in the same topic.
No more than 3 consecutive replies are allowed. Please edit your previous reply, or wait for someone to reply to you.

It almost made me just leave it with that and not post my findings and with that wasting my time. :frowning:

#41

The only interesting screenshot is the one with your settings, for the others: We usually believe, that you see the issue. The question is often, if “we” can reproduce the problem to find a cause/work-around/bug-report etc.
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So, if you beleivei or not there is some sense in the limit.
Also pleas consider spam/advertisements. So new users have tp be limited unless they can be ruled out to spam a thread.

#42

Thanks for your response.
Regarding the screenshots, I’ve been a software developer my entire life (>30 years) and from experience I know that adding screenshots in the bug report (even when the data is also delivered in an attachment) has added value; the person that is reading (or quickly assessing) the bug report, can just keep on reading it, supported by the screenshots. It adds speed and extra clarity / confirmation, without having to switch to saving the files and opening them.
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In any way, most important is that the bug needs attention. :slight_smile:

#43

But bug reports (even great ones!) are off-topic here! Incorrect expectation, that this is a bug tracker, is likely the reason why you were so upset?

#44

It seems that Arial is a very old font, current version 2.55 was shipped on 4th November 1998, see Arial font family - Typography | Microsoft Learn . Microsoft is on to its second default font since then, from Calibri around 2007 to now Aptos.

If I look at the Fonts embedded in the PDF, I see only ArialMT, not Arial

If I set the Default cell style to Liberation Sans (same metrics as Arial) then the pdf is rendered correctly.

[Edit]
I see Windows 11 uses Arial version 7.00 (or 7.01, maybe a fix for Arial?)

If I export to pdf in Mint Linux with MS-Core-fonts (Arial 2.82) then the pdf exports OK

If I export to pdf in Windows 10 (Arial 6 & also when updated to Arial 7.00) the pdf exports OK

#46

Thx. I tested this with Liberation Sans and indeed the PDF seems to render correctly everytime. I’ll switch to that.
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Still its strange that with Arial there is a mixed result in exporting to PDF. Varying from not including the italic texts at all, to including the italic texts, but not in italic and including italic as it should.
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Before I used OpenOffice Calc for at least 10 years, never had an issue with exactly the same Calc sheets and Italic Arial. Recently installed LibreOffice, and within 2 or 3 PDF exports I noticed this issue and had to revert back to OpenOffice Calc, working just fine.

#47

which indeed indicates a problem that needs to be solved. However, I must say, that while I was able to reproduce the “including the italic texts, but not in italic” part using v25.8, I do not reproduce it using current master (toward 26.2); which may indicate either that it was fixed in master, or that it doesn’t manifest in a debug build.

1 Like
#48

For what it is worth I pretty much only used Liberation Serif… I won’t be working on projects like these until next month but I’m happy to report back in if they are still bugged on the new version.

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