writer export to PDF has no text

[chillies]

Version: 6.4.4.2
Build ID: FreeBSD ports 6.4.4
CPU threads: 8; OS: FreeBSD 12.1; UI render: default; VCL: qt5;
Locale: en-GB (en_GB.UTF-8); UI-Language: en-GB
Calc: threaded

Hello,

Libreoffice Writer export of anyfile type to PDF results in a blank PDF. This has just started happening, with this version. I have removed and rebuilt Libreoffice, and have deleted ~/.cache/libreoffice, tried creating another user and logging in as that other user and the problem persists, and I don’t know of what else to do. cups-pdf and cups are installed. No issues rendering PDFs with xpdf, just those PDFs generated by export directly-to-pdf or export-pdf in Libreoffice.

edit: not sure if it’s relevant, but have noticed that if a large textfile (.odt) is loaded and let’s say it’s three pages of A4 long, the conversion-to-pdf is also over several (blank) pages.

I’m hesitant to blame the problem on the OS or other installed programs as I understand Libreoffice is able to handle PDF (and epub) export natively? The last working version was 6.3.6

[mikekaganski]

LibreOffice uses poppler for PDF export.

[chillies]

Here’s a workaround for the time being:

env SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen libreoffice &

or, as I also have kf5

env SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=kf5 libreoffice &

but qt5 (also installed) doesn’t work

[jmux]

This is either bug 125234 or bug 130149. The kf5 backend internally uses qt5 and basically just adds some additional, non-qt KDE / Plasma integration.

The main difference: it uses Cairo for text “processing”, instead of native Qt.

You can enable this with SAL_VCL_QT5_USE_CAIRO=1.

If it’s the latter bug, you use some currently unsupported font format, where the workaround is to use an other font.