Navigator in Writer shows frame text and body text as bookmarks

LO v4.2.4.2, Win7 x64/sp1+

I’m learning the hard way about setting up my paragraph and text body styles at the start of a new project, and paying attention to that: I’ve been living in the land of unconscious Styles and now my bad dreams are showing up…

I can’t explain any of the more than 4 thousand unconscious inappropriate changes I’ve made, but I have this 200 page doc with many images, with more pages to add and I’ve discovered that when I Export to pdf with bookmarks, the first twenty or so contain the text from text frames, and then the Heading 1 shows, and the H2 and H3 that I’m using-that’s all for the headings.

In addition to all of the junk text frame heading/bookmarks that appear in Navigator before H1, my last H2 with H3’s has practically every line of Text Body as a separate book mark.

I have Text Body set and Default Style that mirrors those settings.

I went through all of the pages line by line practically and found some unwanted higher number H styles set on blank lines and I removed those.

I can have the Navigator show only the levels I want, and I’ve demoted all of the junk (non)heading/bookmarks but Export to pdf still adds all of the rest.

Are there any other tricks I can apply to clean this doc up and get my Export to pdf bookmarks cleaned up?

As I needed to clean up the mess in a MSO Word document, I like to say that you are lucky because you have LibO.

What would I do?

1 - Create a afety copy of the current version
2 - If file is in doc-format, I would save in odt-format before doing next steps

Next steps is a bit difficult because I have to imagine a lot. Thus, please consider that I might be wrong.

2 - Select all > right click > default format. This will reset all direct formatting and gets you back to the styles you applied from the styles window; text body etc; Headings should remain)

3 - Insert > Bookmarks > select all bookmarks you don’t need and delete them. (In the Navigator you cannot select more than 1 bookmark)

If this all doesn’t give you what you need

3 - Select all and
— apply the text body style ( you have one and I assume this is what you need by more than 90%)
— apply heading style
— apply other styles you need - recommended is to have such a style defined in Styles & Formatting
— the book marks you really need

Although you can use Undo steps (how many depends on your settings in Tools > option > …) be careful! Consider to make repeated safety copies as you work on your file.

Because you have 200 pages and want to add more, I recommend to learn how to work with a Master Document. For this have a look into the free manual: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/documentation/

ROSt52: Thanks for your reply. The original is in odt, and I have multiple backups.

I knew my message might be confusing because I used the term “bookmarks.” That’s why I decided to use the phrase “heading/bookmarks.” The terminology is confusing because a “heading” in odt becomes a “bookmark” when exported to pdf, and that’s what I’ve been using–headings and not “odt bookmarks.”

The Master Document is something I’ve skimmed over and I thank you for reminding me of that.

The scheme I’m going to start with today is to keep the pages as separate chapter files, and when I get the first two chapters finished, then I’ll export them to pdf and with “PDF Split and Merge” I’ll merge the first two chapters and see if the “headings” are merged as the pdf bookmarks I’m hoping for.

I’ll report back on how this works.

What I need is access to the text: many of the graphics are of text, so I have “ABBYY Screenshot Reader” which works well. It came with my Epson Perfection V33.

With the free version of “Note Tab, Note Tab Light,” I have a page set to capture the clipboard, and so whatever images of text “ABBYY Screenshot Reader” captures/converts, automatically is sent to that “pasteboard.txt” tab/page in Note Tab Light.