Xfce Forum

gwhitney

Member

Registered: 2017-04-10

Posts: 5

xfce 20.3 - LibreOffice detrimental clipboard interaction

I am running xfce4 20.3 in a well-updated OpenSUSE Tumbleweed installation. Copy/paste in LibreOffice often results in images rather than copies of the underlying internal objects, as reported in many LibreOffice discussions, e.g. https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/copy-past … calc/45811. In all such discussions, the difficulty traces back to some other program interacting with the Xwindows clipboard in a way that disrupts LibreOffice's use of it. Therefore, I removed xfce4-clipman-plugin entirely from my system and rebooted, but the problem persists. On the other hand, if I boot into an LXQt session, the LibreOffice difficulties go away. I'd rather not switch away from LXQt, but I do need to be able to use LibreOffice cut and paste properly.

Can anyone offer any insight/guidance as to what part of xfce4 20.3 might be manipulating the clipboard in a way that disrupts LibreOffce cut and paste, and if so, how I could disable that clipboard interaction? Thanks so much. I have of course also asked on the LibreOffice forum and will post any answers I find back here.

Tamaranch

Member

From: France

Registered: 2020-12-31

Posts: 358

Website

Re: xfce 20.3 - LibreOffice detrimental clipboard interaction

Can you provide precise steps to reproduce the problem?

If you want to completely disable the clipboard manager in xfce, in addition to disabling xfce4-clipman-plugin, you need to run xfsettingsd with the environment variable XFSETTINGSD_NO_CLIPBOARD=1.

gwhitney

Member

Registered: 2017-04-10

Posts: 5

Re: xfce 20.3 - LibreOffice detrimental clipboard interaction

Thank you so much, that did the trick.

As far as reproducing the problem, start up a relatively vanilla xfce 20 desktop with xfsettingsd running without the environment setting you mention. Start up LibreOffice. Open a Drawing document. Create any geometric entity, say a line. Select the line. Copy and paste it. Repeat a few times. More or less randomly, sometimes the pasted line will not be a LibreOffice line object, but rather an image of a line. When things are in the bad state, it always pastes as an image at least one out of three times, sometimes much more often. With the environment variable setting you provide, the problem goes away altogether. Thanks again, you saved me from having to figure out how to configure LXQt the way I would like.

Added later 49 min 54 s:
It turns out that I am by no means the first reporter of this disruptive interaction in the past couple of weeks: see for example https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/libre-imp … box/117857 or https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/copy-past … r/117679/4. So it seems to me this would be worthy of an issue report to xfsettingsd, rather than just a discussion here on the forum. If you agree and could direct me to the proper place for bug reports, I would be happy to open an issue. Thanks.

Tamaranch

Member

From: France

Registered: 2020-12-31

Posts: 358

Website

Re: xfce 20.3 - LibreOffice detrimental clipboard interaction

Yeah, that would be welcome. The right place is https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/libxfce4ui/-/issues, where the clipboard manager daemon code for xfsettingsd as well as clipman is hosted.