After I inserted some text from a website into LibreOffice, I get these arrows that show up all over the place. And the software adds blank lines and spaces frequently, the latter usually at the end of a paragraph. I uninstalled LO and reinstalled it, with the behavior still appearing. How do I get rid of this?
Using MacOS.
The moral of this story – don’t copy stuff directly from the Internet into your document.
If it is only the text that you want, first copy it into a plain text editor and edit out all of the formatting etc. Then copy that into your document.
If you want the pictures and other graphics too, it might be simpler to copy them individually and separately. It depends.
If you want the copied stuff to look in your document just like it does on the web, well … “some assembly is required”, fancy and tricky editing, frustration, and time lost. Good luck.
I have an extension that allows me to copy as plain text. If I fail to do that I use the paste option in LO for unformatted text. But in my hurry, it got skipped.
Moral of the story: haste makes waste.
All the more when you import text from uncontrolled sources, enable View>Formatting Marks to see what exactly is inserted in your document. HTML and office suites are based on different formatting principles and conversion (or rather a different layout) occurs with the copy. It is better to see what needs to be deleted/changed/moved when it is usually invisible such as paragraph marks, line breaks, variants of space, …
Very true, that! It was a Bible text site. I never import anything besides plain text, for safety, but this time I got in a rush and forgot. Thanks for that tip. Helpful.