Do we have a bug affecting conversion of a document with a rotated text box from .odt to .docx? Or am I doing something wrong?
I used Windows 7 (64)/LO 6.0.6 to create a test file. It is in the form of one side of an imaginary local society’s leaflet intended to be read in portrait format and folded before it is put into a library’s leaflet rack with the rotated text as a front panel. I converted this file to the two forms of docx offered by Writer as well as PDF and have uploaded two of them.
The odt file converts well to a PDF, but this won’t do as an editable draft for society members.
Writer, of course, opened the .odt file perfectly. But both of the .docx files had unrotated text in some sort of a frame - not a rotatable text box.
Word 2010 Starter (the only form of Word I have which I am pretty sure people I send files to still use) opened neither .odt nor .docx files correctly, though all were different from the way they appeared in Writer. The faults in Word 2010 Starter do not surprise me, I expect nothing else from software for which no MSgeld is paid, though it does bother me that lately I have been sending .odt files, telling objectors that Microsoft says all forms of Word back to 2007 will work with odf files (https://support.office.com/en-ie/article/use-word-to-open-or-save-a-document-in-the-opendocument-text-odt-format-20e5189f-86f8-4d8f-ae74-ea06b7df3b0e).
I am more worried by faults in Writer when re-opening the docx files it has created. Are the .docx files defective? It rather undermines my feeble efforts at proselytization if I cannot be sure that what I am sending is the goods as specified.
Of course I can find work-arounds (e.g. insert the front panel as an image), but they have their own drawbacks and my worry about the reliability of docx conversion remains.