Copying Entire Document Including all Formatting

[gnuarm2]

I have a Writer document that has some option set regarding printing that I can’t find to correct. Every other file I’ve tried prints the way I want it to. To fix this one wayward file, I wish to copy the contents of the file to a new file that should allow printing the way I wish. But, when I copy the entire document via copy and paste, some of the formatting is lost.

Fonts seem to all revert to the destination default format. But also margins seem to be different.

Is there a way to copy the entire contents of the document without having to manually adjust the bits that don’t format the same? Making a copy of the file itself seems to copy the problem.

[EarnestAl]

@gnuarm2

Writer document

A file in .doc format, see Print to PDF Using FoxIt in Writer - Text not Selectable.

In the pasted file, open Styles and right-click Default Paragraph and select Modify. In Font tab change to Arial Regular 11 point.

[ajlittoz]

If you experience formatting issue during copy’n’paste, you probably formatted your original file inconsistently. Using toolbar buttons or keyboard shortcuts is called direct formatting and operates in an overriding layer above the style layers. If you didn’t select very accurately your text (and it is very likely if you didn’t enable View>Formatting Marks and selected it with the mouse), you may have missed the starting and ending points of formatting changes (blank screen areas can easily be mistaken for unused space instead of non-printing characters). When you paste, you get the existing formatting in the destination file.

Another possibility is an incomplete definition of some style of the same name in the other file. A fix for this case is to import the style definitions, but according to the wording of your question, you probably don’t use styles.

You didn’t explicitly mentioned the save format of the file , except for “a Writer document”. But as Writer can open a variety of format, including .docx, we have no certainty that the original file is .odt.

[gnuarm2]

So you are saying I have to manually edit everything I can spot as being wrong?

[gnuarm2]

@ajlittoz ,

You are probably right. I tend to not use Styles as I have found them awkward and seldom simplify my work. The document was saved in Microsoft format, .doc. Why would that matter?

@EarnestAl 's suggestion and a change in paragraph formatting to the default style seems to have fixed a lot of what didn’t copy over, but differences remain, I expect in the margins.

Not sure which file you are referring to with incomplete definitions. Is that the source or the destination file?

If you are talking about selection for copying, I selected the entire document, cntl-A.

[ajlittoz]

Working on foreign format files, e.g. not .odt, is the source of many problems because formats are not straight replacement for each other. They don’t describe the same features, meaning the different ones must be approximately translated into the ones the handling app understands. In your case, this is probably the main cause. And repetitive updates with saves in .doc has a dramatic cumulative effect. With a .doc file, there no use applying the sophisticated styles in Writer because they have no equivalent in .doc. You end up with practically 100% direct formatting or equivalently with zillions of single-use character and page styles which is as bad.

If the file is a personal one, import it once for all into Writer, save it .odt and work only in this format to guarantee reliability and reproducibility. If you are in collaborative context with external Word recipients heavily editing the file (and you too), the only way to keep intended formatting is for you to work also with M$ Word.

[gnuarm2]

Thanks for the advice. My documents are very simple other than some of the formula I use in Calc. But I have never had a conversion issue before.

I use Microsoft file formats because these files have to be shared with others, and it is not workable to convert and inspect the file every time I need to share.

We seem to have identified the issue with this, and it is not a conversion problem. It was a feature that was turned on without my knowing about it. This is an old file, and it may have been copied from a web source, so the problem may have been there for a long time and I just never noticed it until now.

[Hrbrgr]

@gnuarm2 ,
good luck furthermore!