Select from A to B in Writer document

[RichardKirk]

When I have a problem in a Writer document, it would be nice to have a clean way to reduce a large document to something smaller that just shows the problem, for debugging and so I can attach a small example to questions like these.

You can select large regions by dragging (eventually), then delete.

We have Select All. New Select from Start and Select to End option might do my job. Deleting onwards ought to be easy, but deleting backwards might have nasty side-effects. Perhaps a more general tool might be to add Select From… and Select To… options.

I found an earlier suggestion for saving pages A-B as a separate document. This is a different way of doing the same thing. If you could save the current page as a separate document to report some problem, you would still have to re-load the document and check the problem still happened. There were also objections because the page breaks were not part of the document.

[Hrbrgr]

…it would be nice to have a clean way to reduce a large document to something smaller …

I recommend you Master documents in Writer

[RichardKirk]

Yes, valid point, maybe my documents should not be that big to start with. However, tools for making them smaller would still help with debugging and error reporting.

I did experiment with master documents, and a separate document for each chapter. I am the only person editing this document, and I found it a lot easier to organize things when there was just one document, and I was moving stuff from one chapter to another. So, I went back to one big document, and I have not looked back. But I can see this would be valuable for collaborative documents where each chapter has a separate author.

Thanks.

[gabix]

You can select large regions by dragging…

Tedious for really large files. Click at the start of the future selection, Shift + click at the end, done.

[RichardKirk]

This is the solution I was looking for. Thanks.

[keme]

Perhaps a more general tool might be to add Select From… and Select To… options.

We already have those.

With “plain” keyboards they are keyboard shortcuts Shift + Ctrl + Home and Shift + Ctrl + End.

If you are on a Mac, the home and end keys may be missing (or not working for this case). My Mac with old fullsize Apple keyboard is at work right now, and I’m not, so I can’t test it, but I believe that you need to use Cmd instead of Ctrl, and that Home is reached by Option + up or Ctrl + Up. Try Shift + Cmd + Option + Up, or any of the other possible combos, and see…