Linux: Images and PDFs don't load if vault contains accented letters such as é (non english, non ascii, cjk, Umlauts)

Which filesystem do you use?

we can’t reproduce this.

Same issue with the appimage.

I believe the filesystem is part of the OS (Linux), so it should be the same in every distro.

it’s not.

Oh I see: I’m using ext4

What happens if you set your system language to English and restart your computer?

In my case the language of my OS is already set to en_GB.UTF-8.

I switched everything to Default.UTF-8 and the problem is still there.

We can’t reproduce. But we got enough reports to believe that this is real issue. Probably an upstream electron problem with some linux setups.

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So I tried reproducing it. Made a bunch of vms.
Tested by creating a folder on the desktop called ‘test vaulté’. Downloading the obsidian logo into it. And then dragging the image from inside obsidian’s left panel, to a new note.
(:white_check_mark: means It worked as intended, not reproduced)

Tested using the flatpak version:

  • :white_check_mark: Garuda dr460nized 220822
  • :white_check_mark: Manjaro kde 21.3.7-220816 linux 515
  • :white_check_mark: EndevourOS artemis neo 22.8
  • :white_check_mark: Ubuntu 22.04.1
  • :white_check_mark: Popos 22.04
  • :white_check_mark: Fedora Silverblue 36.1.5

Native package repo:

  • :white_check_mark: Manjaro
  • :white_check_mark: Garuda
  • :white_check_mark: EndevourOS

AUR (appimage version):

  • :white_check_mark: Manjaro
  • :white_check_mark: Garuda
  • :white_check_mark: EndevourOS

SO, I EVENTUALLY FOUND THE PROBLEM:
In kde plasma I set my region settings here to be Belgium English. And when I did that on my garuda vm, I managed to reproduce the issue

image

@zeegroen can you confirm what happens if you set those region settings back to amarican english (all of them)

Can also confirm changing the format settings on Fedora silverblue, Ubuntu and Popos (all running gnome as their desktop environment)

Changing ‘formats’ to Belgium, Germany and many more probably. Seem to cause the issue

Last reply:
On Gnome you only have 1 setting that controls all format related things.
On KDE Plasma you have granual control. And it seems like the ‘Region’ setting is what’s causing the problem there. Even if you set it to ‘default.UTF-8’ it still causes issues. It has to be set to ‘en_US.UTF-8’.
But this seems to be a more general linux/electron issue, not a distro or desktop enviroment specific thing.

AS A TEST. I fully reinstalled manjaro but select Dutch as my language this time.
Interestingly enough. That works fine. (double-checked, it did automatically set the format settings to nl_BE automatically)
Changing it to American English doesn’t break it.
And changing it back to nl_BE again also doesn’t break it.

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Thanks for all the testing.

Ok my suspicious was correct. This is an electron problem tied to system locale.

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@Thibaultmol I could reproduce it! The interface in KDE to change regional settings has changed however, and when I changed the settings to American English, I saw no changes. I had to modify /etc/locale.conf to manually set everything to en_US.UTF-8 to make it work. Thanks for investigating!

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If anyone on flatpak is looking for a quick fix for this: Edit the Exec command in ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share/applications/md.obsidian.Obsidian.desktop and add an --env=LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 after the run command.

I opened this bug and @WhiteNoise linked it to this already opened one.

I was a bit surprise that my recent bug could be related to another one opened months ago, because before updating yesterday everything was working fine in my vault which contains a lot of image with non-ascii names. I tried changing my locales and many other things, but the issue was still there… then I decided to uninstall Obsidian from the snapstore and re-install it with the deb package, as it was before. Now the images in my vault show up.

If any one is looking for a quick fix, from my tests: the snap version triggers issue, but not the deb package one.

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Cheers mate! It works for me! Thanks for saving my time!

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I can confirm that this bug only shows up for me when using the snap version and not when using the .deb version. Thank you Evelf!

OS: Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS [A variant of Ubuntu]
OS language: English (United States)
Characters causing the bug: The Swedish “ö” character

I have the same issue on Linux Mint 21.2 with a snap version 1.4.13. In my case, the problem was Polish letter ł.

Steps to reproduce

  • create a pdf with an umlaut in the filename, say: Bühne.pdf
  • embed the file via ![[Bühne.pdf]]

Did you follow the troubleshooting guide? [Y/N]

Yes. I copied the pdf over into the sandbox at ~/snap/obsidian/21/.config/obsidian/Obsidian Sandbox/ and tried to embed it. Same result.

Expected result

The pdf is displayed

Actual result

The pdf viewer shows no content and 0 pages.

Environment

SYSTEM INFO:
	Obsidian version: v1.4.16
	Installer version: v1.4.16
	Operating system: #101-Ubuntu SMP Tue Nov 14 13:30:08 UTC 2023 5.15.0-91-generic
	Login status: not logged in
	Insider build toggle: off
	Live preview: on
	Legacy editor: off
	Base theme: dark
	Community theme: none
	Snippets enabled: 0
	Restricted mode: on

RECOMMENDATIONS:
	none

I clicked on »Sandbox Vault« but nothing changed — same output.


THX!

nix package and flatpak on fedora 39 with btrfs are also involved. The letters which caused problems for me so far are: á é ő ö. Changing them to ascii comatible ones (a,e,o) solves the issue.

on my os every language configuration are set to en_US.UTF-8.