Will the distorted text ever be fixed?

[Cupax1]

Hello.
I’ve been testing the LibreOffice (and OpenOffice before that) literally for two decades now.
Every single time I gave up using it because of a bug in one single thing a word editor should be able to do in the very first place: displaying text!

Drag-selecting text over multiple pages would distort it, add white lines, deform it or even delete entire lines.

For me this is a very serious bug that has been present forever and should be fixed before making any further developement.

Take a look at my screen grab below:

LO Writer bug 2022 — Postimages

[ajlittoz]

When you complain about anything, it is wise to describe accurately and fully the context: OS name, desktop environment, LO version, …
Remember we are users just like you and we can help for issues related to LO use in its present state, such as misunderstandings in the user manual, tricky procedures to get something done, known compatibility problems, … When it comes to reproducible bugs, they should be channeled to the developers on LO Bugzilla.

[LeroyG]

Have you tried to disable Use Skia for all rendering?

EDIT: Original post: Why does the issue of on-screen rendering corruption persist (after so long)? (2015-01-23)

[Cupax1]

Well, the whole problem is actually connected to how scrolling works in LO. When you move your cursor up/down to the edge of the page the view will jump for multiple lines (here you are going to lose your eye focus on the cursor) instead of a single line (as every other word editor i know). This is not just my own opinion, there is a tread open on this forum about this:

How to change single-line scrolling behavior in Writer?

As it is now, when I use the cursor keys to move up and down through the lines of a document, one at a time, as soon as the cursor hits the ‘scroll threshold’, the screen jumps several lines in the direction the cursor is moving. I’d like to disable that jumping behavior and have the screen advance one line at a time. The current jumping is terrible for revision work, as when I’m reading through a paragraph working on edits and the cursor hits that scroll zone, the entire screen landscape chan…

Now, if you want to somehow fix this behaviour you can enable “smooth scrolling” in the settings. This way the page will slowly move as you hit the bottom or top - now here the distorted text bug comes alive.

So probably the best fix for future LO editions would be to fix the scrolling behaviour to “scroll per one line only” or even better, to add this option in the settings.

[EarnestAl]

It sounds like a graphics issue, I wonder if you did try @LeroyG suggestion to untick Skia?

[Cupax1]

Done that, as well as enabling/disabling hardware acceleration. Always the same issue.

[Cupax1]

Sorry about that:
My recent computer is a PC running Windows 10 x64 with latest release of LO. I have the “smoot scrolling” enabled in settings. Without that enabled, Writer is completely unusable when selecting text because of a screen jumping.
In overall screen scrolling, text selecting and moving LO has lot to learn from Word.

But as I said, I’ve been tracing this bug for 2 decades now, I’ve always had WIndows PCs.

Anyway, I’ll channel my question tho the bugzilla.

[ajlittoz]

1. This is no solution to your initial question. In order to avoid confusion and harm to you (potential contributors presently see that your question has been answered and may prefer not to bother any more, depriving you from any solution), edit your question to add there required details.
2. “latest release of LO” does not mean anything because it can be different tomorrow and can also be different depending on how you install LO (manual install or automated management). So quote explicitly version number (better, copy data given by Tools>About LibreOffice).

[Cupax1]

I understand your point. But if you read my question again you will see, that this is more of a generalistic question, not connected to my recent hardware or LO version.

I’ve posted this bug to the LO development some years ago. The answer I’ve got from them is, that they know about this bug since forever. But because the render engine of LO is written in it’s very core, nobody wants to even go close to edit or even fix it. It would probably break everything else.

So I’m asking: what’s the point of developing the software if it’s very core is broken and as I understood - untouchable?

Well, I’ve heard many stories of commercial developers that rewrote their applications from scratch through the years, since hardware is changing all the time, OSes are changing and bringing new features, so old software just can’t cope with them.

[LeroyG]

@Cupax1

I’ve posted this bug

Can you share the bug report number, please?

EDIT: tdf#146885

[flywire]

Redisplay page eg PageDown so text is not visible then PageUp and it will likely be redisplayed correctly or maybe print preview and back. iirc I worked this out using MS Word years ago.