I double click on a document and the blue Writer icon appears on the bar at the bottom but doesn’t actually open the doc. When you hover the mouse over the blue Writer icon it shows the document title, no white document underneath it (it’s just a blank grey) and a small black rectangle in the middle with three dots and the first 3 letters of the word ‘File’. Nothing else. Has been working perfectly fine for a year. I tried to open the same files from ‘Recents’ by opening Writer separately but the same thing happened. And now Writer doesn’t open either. Just before this happened it asked me to recover a file, which is totally normal. But then the file wouldn’t open like it normally does when you click on ‘Finish’. I also just tried to download a new copy of LibreOffice from libreoffice.org and when I clicked on ‘Install’ got the attached error message
Could it be a recent update messed up the window manager user-private configuration? Are you under Gnome, KDE or else?
The black rectangle could a (very) reduced version of a window showing only part of the window title bar. When hover over it, does your mouse pointer turn into “expansion arrow” near the rectangle borders? If so, try to expand the window. Once you have a reasonably-sized window, make a few modification in the document and save it. I think a save is necessary. The window should reopen correctly afterwards.
Hi @ajlittoz. Thanks so much for trying. Sadly it’s not a reduced version of a window. It’s like Writer tried to fire up a document and just failed. There’s no expansion arrow that appears when near the borders. It’s just the bog standard arrow that doesn’t change wherever you point it. As for updates, I haven’t run any updates for almost two weeks and Writer has been fine every day since then. However I don’t know what Gnome, KDE are. V inexperienced Linux user. Can I look that up to find out?
If the mouse cursor does not change its shape, it is irrelevant. For better understanding of the situation, can you tell LO version and attach a screenshot?
open a terminal, run killall -9 soffice and try again.
Hi Villeroy. Just tried that and it says, ‘soffice: no process found’
This is while it’s showing on the task bar at the bottom where I theoretically have Writer open.
I can’t use my Screenshot app thingy cos I as soon as I click away from hovering over the Writer to click, ‘Take Screenshot’ the message disappears. And I’ve just taken a full screenshot but it’s saying this is over the 4mb limit for messages on here. Grr. Sorry, I’m not being much help.
run libreoffice from a terminal and copy the output (if any).