What is `it` and why is it crashing my documents?

[robo042]

When I put it into a formula I found that it acts like an operator that removes spaces.

I also found that, upon saving a document that contains a formula that uses it in this way will crash and all the objects in that document will disappear.

I opened up LibreOffice Math directly and found that, when saving a formula that utilizes it I’m fully unable to save the formula as an odf document. Says “Write Error”.

What is it and why is it crashing my documents? Are we just not allowed to have an i followed by a t in any formulas?

Version: 24.2.7.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 420(Build:2)
CPU threads: 20; OS: Linux 6.9; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Ubuntu package version: 4:24.2.7-0ubuntu0.24.04.3
Calc: threaded

[ajlittoz]

I didn’ find it in the official documentation. From experimentation, it seems to behave like a binary operator “glueing” visually its operands (suppressing spacing between them).

For example, a it b gives “ab”.

I suppose it is useful to create “mixed” identifiers like %alpha it 1, concatenating Greek character and number to form a single id, which is impossible otherwise. The it operator is associative either: %alpha it %beta it %gamma gives the expected result.

Since it is a binary operator, the crash may be caused by the lack of an operand (it may be the first or last item in a formula).

[Nexodakis]

I have the same “Write Error”. Someone can file a bug report if they think it’s a bug. https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/. Temporary, you could use double quotation marks around "it". It works for me.

[Lupp]

I also tried to find an explanation or a help text mentioning the it as a layout operaror (right / unary I thought deducing from experiments), but I failed.
Now I supposed a bug and used my “museum of versions” to find out when the issue showed first. The result was Version 7.1. Then I tried again to understand the “it - issue” as a “new feature” and studied release notes. Zero findings.
Conclusion: It’s a (very strange) bug.
See tdf#165976.
The originally typed string was Fool it Barrels.

[robo042]

Thank you. This very nearly caused a catastrophic loss of months of work. If you have a document with lots and lots of formulas, this bug can cause you to lose ALL of those formulas. If you hit that save button twice then the LibreOffice backups won’t help.

Luckily I figured out the issue before losing too much work. Next guy might not be so lucky. Thank you for your prompt attention to this.