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#1 2018-10-27 20:44:59

Altoid
Member
Registered: 2017-05-07
Posts: 1,415  

[Solved] LibreOffice - non-English language locales and tilde

Hello:

I'm posting this for those who use non-English language locales in their Devuan installation. 

I had been trying for the longest while to find a solution to a keyboard/locale related problem that was affecting my LibreOffice installation.
I had checked that both the locale and keyboard layout were properly set but could find no other setting that could be changed to solve the issue.

As I write in both Spanish, English and once every so often in French, this was beginning to annoy me.
The idea is that I should be able to type at least all these characters during the normal use of my kb:

á é í ó ú - à è ì ò ù - â ê î ô û - ä ë ï ö ü - ç ñ 

Á É Í Ó Ú - À È Ì Ò Ù - Â Ê Î Ô Û - Ä Ë Ï Ö Ü - Ç Ñ

The problem was that (in LO and only in LO) even though I was able to type the letter ñ / Ñ which is unique to the Spanish alphabet, I was unable to add a tilde to any of the letters that carried one, whereas in every other application, from Leafpad to Master PDF Editor, even in the Firefox address bar, the problem did not occur.

I searched all over to no avail, coming across solutions that proposed adding the accents through the spell check (!) or with a macro.

Then I decided to do the search in Spanish instead of English (a duh! moment) and came across this page in the Archlinux Wiki:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Li … _(Español)

Obviously it's in Spanish but I'm sure there's an English version of it in the Wiki.

For whatever reason, it seems that the locale settings es_AR.ISO-8559-1 and es_AR.UTF-8 or es_ES.ISO-8859-1 and es_ES.UTF-8 are not enough for LO to be able to type characters with a tilde. (AR/ES = Argentina/Spain country codes)

You also have to set the en_US.ISO-8859-1 and en_US.UTF-8 locales to be able to do it even though these are not used in the English language.
It's a mystery to me.

I've only had time to test this with the SP and AR locales, but my guess is that it is probably (?)  the same thing with any other non-English language locales using ISO-8559-1 and UTF-8 latin-1 character sets.

Cheers,

A.

Last edited by Altoid (2018-10-27 20:46:20)

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