Hello there, for years now I’ve tried to save long (roughly 200 page) documents in pdf format. But when I look later the pages have horribly shifted creating a lot more work to rearrange, check and fix the document. With much extra tries I finally get a perfect document saved. It’s a slog, but it can be done.
What’s happening is that when I export to save the file, the text shifts 1 or 2 lines down the page thereby knocking lots of pages out of synch.
I currently use Libre 6.0.7.3. Was this bug ever fixed by the team? Is it worth it upgrading to the 6.3.6 version to fix the problem? I’m using Ubuntu, 18.04 LTS.
Thank you in advance, Iain
Which bug ID at bugzilla are you referring to? Have you ever filed a bug report? If not - it is likely that no developer ever got aware of the bug and it won’t be fixed for the next years as well.
Thank you for that. I’ve never filed a bug report before. I’ll look into that, as I have a document which I’m currently compiling in PDF in LibreOffice. The same problem is occurring again.
There may be very subtle export conversion issues. How do you format your document? Using styles consistently or spacing with empty paragraphs?
Every time there are “page sync” problems, they usually originate in an improper use of direct formatting. Remember that pages are an abstraction in Writer, they do not exist as primary objects. The correct and reliable way to sync with pages is through Text Flow parameters (the most obvious of which is page break).
I’m not sure how I format my documents, but they do contain a lot of charts, different sized fonts and styles, photos etc. I don’t think I have empty paragraphs, but there are large spaces, for example at the end of a chapter.
However I now look forward to researching the topics of Text Flow and page breaks. I’m optimistic that this may be where the problem can be solved. I’ll spend an evening trying this before reporting the problem as a ‘bug’. Thank you for your help, Iain.
I’ll spend an evening trying this before reporting the problem as a ‘bug’.
It’s great that you took the effort and got familiar with the great concept of better formatting techniques; they indeed will allow you to be more efficient in using the tool.
However, a bug is a bug, even if there are workarounds. And what you had described in your question is a bug: even although you used an inefficient and deprecated technique to format your work, it still should not result in shifts when exported to PDF. So please still file a bug report, with a sample ODT file which demonstrates the problem.
I would like to thank both users above for their help, especially ajlittoz who appears to have solved my problem. I spent an hour or two playing with the page break command. What I found is that if you insert a page break where the pages tend to shift (in my case perhaps a dozen pages out of 200) this solves the problem. It also prevents you from having to go through the entire book putting in hundreds of page breaks.
For newbies that means doing the following:
Place the cursor where you want to force a page break.
Click ‘Insert’ on the top left of the screen.
From the menu click ‘Page Break’.
Repeat with each page you want to force a break on.
I wish I’d come here for help a couple of years back : ) Never mind, thank you all once again - Iain
You might prefer CTRL+ENTER for speed