GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 112091
Problems with special characters (Umlauts) throughout GnuCash
Last modified: 2018-06-29 20:31:34 UTC
Hi! GnuCash won't accept special characters (such as ä, ö, ü) any more. As soon as I try to type one into an input field, the whole content disappears. I can continue typing - all keystrokes are recorded normally. I can even delete the character which makes the entire content reappeart. A similar thing happens to menu items - as soon as they contain a special character, they just disappear. gnucash --debug keeps stating Error: gnc_mbstowcs: bad multi-byte conversion Error: gnc_quickfill_insert: bad text conversion I don't know if this is a GnuCash problem or if some of my libraries are broken - as I don't have much experience with GNOME, I don't even know where to start... Thanks for your time Volker
This is the same bug as bug#110437 , but unfortunately nobody has had any ideas so far.
What locale are you using? Something with UTF-8, e.g. de_DE.UTF-8 ? Then try to start gnucash in the non-utf-8 locale, i.e. on the command line type LANG=de_DE gnucash Does that change the behaviour?
Sorry to say so, but this doesn't change anything. Initially, LANG is set to de_DE.ISO-8859-1. One thing I've noted is that the menu items appear correctly with all special characters for a fraction of a second before disappearing. BTW (don't know if it's related): If I run 'gnucash', guile segfaults. With either 'gnucash --debug', 'lang=de_DE gnucash' or 'lang=de_DE gnucash --debug', it doesn't. Perhaps a Heisenbug?
I have the same problem and I am using de_DE.UTF-8. When I change this as suggested before calling gnucash with export LANG=de_DE;gnucash the problem disappears. So it indeed looks like GnuCash does not like de_DE.UTF-8.
In my case the problem occured with a fresh installation of RedHat 9, which uses de_DE.UTF-8 as default.
Volker: If you run 'gnucash' (no arguments) and get a guile segfault -- any chance that you can submit the guile backtrace here? i.e. you start gnucash from gdb as described at the end of the HACKING file, and submit the backtrace after the segfault? Maybe that might help in narrowing down the problem.
In the meantime I upgraded to version 1.8.4; that fixed the segfault, but not the problem described above.
*** Bug 110437 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Bug 110437 has a patch to make datecell display correctly with japanese locale, but I'm afraid it's just a workaround.
*** Bug 102048 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 156444 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
A simple solution to bug 156444, which has been marked duplicate of this one, was to change the gnome-gnucash.desktop Exec line to: Exec=/bin/sh -c "LANG=pt_BR.ISO-8859-1 gnucash" For some reason, Fedora Core 2 distributed Brazilian Portuguese locale as pt_BR.UTF-8. There should be a better way to configure this in the distribution.
*** Bug 144444 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I'm certainly not seeing any problems with umlauts in 1.9.3. Can someone confirm that this is no longer an issue in 1.9.x? Christian? adding Christian to CC.
The problems with Umlauts are fixed in the 2.0 version due to the gtk2 migration.
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