Sunday, November 22, 2009

OpenOffice SFxApplication Bug

While working with OpenOffice 2.4 I found an interesting bug. When I would export a document to PDF the equation editor would randomly replace numbers with their Arabic equivalent. Since 2.4 is an old version I decided to upgrade to 3.1. After waiting for the download I discovered that when I tried to install it there were many inter-related dependancies that were not met. I solved this by doing a dpkg -i *.deb from the downloaded directory. This appeared to work until I tried to run it from /opt/openoffice.org3/. I was given an error about SFx Application iso or something. Luckily that bug had already been reported but apparently it hasn't been fixed. I found the solution in the OpenOffice.org QA section.

After doing a dpk -i on the following files everything appears to work fine.
  • dpk -i ooobasis-*-binfilter*.deb
  • dpk -i openoffice.org3-en-*.deb
  • dpk -i openoffice.org3-ure*.deb
The issue may be related to the fact that 2.4 has not been uninstalled.