The WHO table you link (in the comments) pastes fine into a Writer document here using either v3.5.7.2 or v4.0.2.2. Inspecting the code of the table shows it to be a typical plain HTML table with structure:
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>...</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>...</td>
</tr>
...etc...
</tbody>
</table>
It has a few attributes for some of the elements, but nothing unusual. All I can suggest is: a) the table in your email is malformed; b) the HTML filter in LO may not be handling the particular HTML construction used in your table. Can you have a look at the HTML code in the email? See if has any spanned columns or unusual syntax.
EDIT: As a result of the provided source HTML (third comment below). I had a look at the HTML in the email and there are numerous issues. The structure and form of the code is really not great, which is what I guessed. Here are the main problems as I see them (and as the W3C Validator service reported them):
-
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
: This initial declaration indicates probably XHTML 1.0 Transitional schema with UTF-16 encoding. I can’t see a reason for using UTF-16 encoding and so manually altered this to “utf-8” for validation purposes.
-
DOCTYPE: I said “indicates XHTML 1.0 Transitional schema” because there is no included DOCTYPE statement. The W3C Validator confirms this.
-
Errors: There are 35 errors ad 33 warnings reported, so it is definitely not valid markup. While many of the errors and warnings relate to missing “alt=” attributes and embedded PHP statements, there are several missing end tags and misplaced tags e.g.,
<td>
element immediately after a <table>
element. It is basically, rather poor code.
-
Code elegance: The excessive nesting of
<table>
elements within other <table>
elements is ugly. There are six tables within each other in the first 40 lines of code and 29 tables in total. Good code would only have one <table>
element and then divide the content as I indicated above: separate head and body areas with rows and cells in each. There are no <thead>
or <tbody>
elements at all. Web browsers are very forgiving of these types of omissions. LO may not be as forgiving because it has to translate this mess into a valid XML schema.
My (very basically) cleaned version of the HTML is here. Save it to a *.html file, open it in a browser, and copy / paste into Writer. It should paste much as before. With respect to your initial problem of the content appearing to paste in a tall thin manner, this appears to be due to the left and right graphical end-parts of the ticket display. There are other parts of the ticket that do not position well, when compared with the browser HTML, but these two parts are the worst.
Both images after pasting into Writer are set to a relative height of ~4-6% (right click on the graphic > Picture… > Type tab). While each image is set within a <td>
element immediately after a <table>
element (i.e., one of the errors mentioned), LO appears to be forgiving of this. What LO is less forgiving about is that both images have height="100%"
specified, which should be either an exact value (the height of the graphic) or height="auto"
. Editing these values, as in this HTML results in a significantly cleaner result. This is one of many, many such problems with the HTML in the e-ticket.
Overall, the answer as to why your e-ticket will not paste under LO, like it does under Word, is probably because Word is more forgiving of poor code.