I am working on documents that have been created in Libre Office Writer, not in Word. One is a complicated table using varying font sizes of Arial throughout; the other is a document containing text boxes. I am saving them as documents (.doc). The problem I am encountering is that, having updated the documents and then saved them, when I reopen them, the fonts revert to other types and sizes. For instance, the table fonts revert to Calibri and a different size. The text boxes containing Edwardian font 36 pt bold, revert to Ariel bold. There is no rhyme or reason to this! It happens every time I save, close, and then reopen these documents.
First rule: always save in native format, that is .odt. There are fundamental differences between formats ; the ancient .doc needs to be converted to odt internally on opening and back to .doc on saving. You might like to look at this longtime pinned post on the OpenOffice forum Apache OpenOffice Community Forum - [Tutorial] Differences between Microsoft and AOO/LO files - (View topic)
This doesn’t matter as you yourself ask to translate them to another world (.doc) on every Save and Open. The question is: Is it necessary to use .doc?
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If you need to exchange data with users of MS-Office, prefer the more modern .docx. I think I remember some improvements mentioned in release notes for text boxes.
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MS-Office can also read .odt, but I don’t expect to MS to put much effort in this topic. If they do, it would be a valuable option…
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As long as you find on every save and open the same results you have reason (conversion of format) and rhyme (reproducible result), but you may not like the song.
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Try .docx and if you find the same similiar results there consider a bug-report (see below), as LibreOffice tries to improve compatibility. But the quickest “solution” to this is using .odt
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Bugs should be submitted directly to Bugzilla:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=LibreOffice&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_severity=normal
Even though the advise to prefer native file format (with any software you use) is good, still, what you describe sounds like a bug. As @Wanderer mentioned, bugs must be filed to a proper place, with sample data or very specific reproduction steps, to allow testing, debugging, and fixing. Thank you!
Sorry, the .doc rather than .docx was the result of using voice to text, which is we all know is less than stellar. Also I appreciate the replies and advice, some of which I understand but you need to know that you’re talking to a 70 year old woman who did her original documents on a manual typewriter! So perhaps this is a bug and needs to be reported but I honestly am uncertain.
As I say, as a 70 year old woman, I honestly can’t be sure this is a bug or something stupid I’m doing. Sorry, but my lifetime extends from manual typewriters through memory writers through Wang word processors and WordPerfect… I’m doing well just to understand as much as I do of using Libre instead of Word, which I can’t afford.
Then please, give us something to test. Create a file, save as .odt this time and then upload the .odt-file here using the upload-button visible while editing:
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