Fixing page format across entire document

[harpwriter]

I edited a book which the author then sent to someone else to re-edit, which she then sent back to me to do a final edit/read-through and prepare for upload. The second editor used MS Word and when I re-opened in Libre Office, all my page styles (front material, chapter start, etc) had been rendered converted 1, converted 2, etc up to converted 256.

In re-setting my front material style to be followed by my chosen style, and applying to page 1 – I got page 1 to be front material but it did not automatically change the following page as it should have.

Is there a way to make it behave as it should and get these pages to lead to the correct next style as per the organizer feature or am I going to have to do every page by hand?

I already tried just copying and pasting into a new document and it just brought the ‘converted 1, 2, 3 etc’ page styles with it.

[ajlittoz]

That the plague of Word polluting the formatting. I suppose the document went back as a .docx. Then you have double punishment: formatting “revised” by Word (not fully compatible with LO) plus translation from .docx to ODF internal format. This is where things get real bad: due to the difference in page management, Writer is forced to create one page style per page with an explicit page break in between.

Unless you go through a thorough manual formatting, similar to full formatting of a plain text .txt file, you won’t recover your nice formatting (I assume you styled your original document with para, char and page styles, didn’t you?).

Have you tried to send an .odt because Word claims it can read it and to request an .odt after the Word review to see if there are differences (I fear there is not)?

[harpwriter]

Thank you. If I must do that, at least it’s good to know I’m not taking a four hour tour when there was a five minute solution. I suspect the other editor is very much do it her way and would not have honored that request even if it would have worked. I know the answer for the future is to not agree to this.

[gabix]

Did you save a backup copy of your original document? Then import page styles using the Stylist to the revised version and apply them as you need (and delete all those Converted styles).

And yes, it is quite a work.

[harpwriter]

Thank you, gabix. Yes, I have the original. I scanned through the menu items and couldn’t find a way to import styles. I see the Style list (F11? the one that comes up in the side bar or a drop down menu is what you’re referring to?) but am not seeing anything about importing.

[harpwriter]

I tried deleting the converted styles already and DELETE comes up gray, ie, it won’t allow me to delete a style being used.

However, some of the styles did suddenly start to force the following pages to the style that is supposed to follow (ie chapter start now results in the next page becoming left page.) I have no idea why it’s working now but won’t work for the ‘first page’ style. Regardless, at least it looks like it won’t be every page by hand.

[gabix]

https://documentation.libreoffice.org/assets/Uploads/Documentation/en/GS5.2/HTML/GS5203-StylesAndTemplates.html#__RefHeading__6250_424592115

[ajlittoz]

The reason why it works with “chapter start” is the page information is in the paragraph style. Paragraph styles are less impacted by the .docx round trip.