how to remove border lines for all frames in document

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#1

I have a long Writer document, apparently created using frames throughout. When I originally downloaded the document, the borders of the frames did not show. For some reason, when I opened the document later (from my hard drive), the borders for all the frames in the whole document showed up. I can 't get rid of them.

First, even after reading the Writer Guide 6.4, I can’t find a “global” command or means of removing such items throughout the whole document without doing so frame by frame.

Second, even on individual frames, if I go to Tools>Options>LibreOffice>Application Colors, the boxes for text boundaries and object boundaries are both unchecked already.

Can anybody tell me how to remove the visible frame borders?

Thanks.

(formatting edited by ajlittoz for readability)

#2

Frames aren’t Text Boxes

Open the Styles sidebar (F11). Select frame Styles

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Right-click on Frame and select Modify…. In the Frame Style dialog box that appears, select the tab Borders, under Line Arrangement > Presets select the leftmost one with the tooltip Set no borders. Ok out.

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Any frames that you have modified manually will not change with this change in style as direct modification over-rides styles. These you will have to change individually by selecting the Frame and then double-clicking the Frame style in the sidebar, they will immediately change to the default Frame style you have just modified.

I recommend reading chapter 9 Styles in the Writer Guide 6.4. Cheers, Al

#3

If you see pale grey borders those are guides just visible to you and won’t print. You can turn them off by clicking View > Text boundaries to toggle visibilty

#4

If the frames are linked. You can click inside one of the frames, press Ctrl+A to select everything inside, Ctrl+ C to copy and then paste outside a frame or into a new document so that pasted text is not in a frame.

#5

Thanks for another suggestion. The borders are dark, 0.5-point lines, not pale grey. I will have to look into the linked frames idea. It’s gittin’ late, so I’ll have to look at that another night.
Have a good ev’nin’.

#6

Did you click the preset? It looks as though it is selected because it has a darker surround. In the screenshot above I hadn’t yet clicked it when I copied it as I wanted the tooltip to show

#7

Re reading this trail I am now sure that you are seeing the text boundaries on the page. To test print one page and see if they print. To turn off visibility see my comment just below my answer.

#8

Al:
Thanks, but I forgot to mention that I tried your suggestion also before I asked the question. Again, the Line Arrangement Preset was already set with no borders.
I have not manually changed any individual frame yet…
(8-D)
(8-|)
8-(
I have read the Styles chapters. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’ve read and re-read a few times.
Thanks again.

#9

This isn’t an answer. Please click the more at the bottom of you answer and repost as a comment

#10

I find it more than a little disturbing that Libreoffice takes a docx with no frames and slaps frames on it. I have a Word document which LO has placed borders around some, but not all, images. This procedure does not rid me of them. I cannot discover a way to make them go away. They really shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

#11

DOCX is not the same as the Writer internal format; therefore it needs translation on load and another translation on save. The formats are not based on the same primitives which adds up to the conversion difficulty. To make things worse, Word has no notion of styles. During the conversion, almost everything is translated to direct formatting.

In a pure .odt document, frames have a frame style applied. By default, this style is Frame for text frames. It is then easy to customise this style to remove borders, provided no direct formatting has been applied to frames. And it is very tempting to direct format frames: an example is moving them with the mouse. Even such a minor edit creates direct formatting.

It is already difficult to achieve stability and predictability without direct formatting in a native .odt document with frame styles. Since frame styles don’t exist in DOCX, you have no other option than editing your frames individually.

#12

Except for the fact that in this document, editing the frames appears to be impossible. Making a general change to the frame style did nothing. Trying to do that to individual frames did nothing. Maybe they’re not frames. Could be borders. Lets look at the properties of the image. Nope. Greyed out and unselectable. If I select the frame and turn lines off, the entire image disappears. I have been unable to discover a way to edit these borders at all. And it still baffles me why some images acquired borders, some did not and others acquired multiple borders. I appreciate the information but it doesn’t help me see a way to fix the document.

And they kind of have to be in Word format. These are activities for my physics course. They have to be posted on a learning management system and it is very restrictive about the file types it will allow. My options are basically Word and pdf, and of those Word is the only one my students can edit to record their answers.

#13

Detailed statements about your problem can only be made if you upload your document (docx) here so that someone can look at it and examine it.

#14

Good point. It would be nice to know how this works, or doesn’t. I’ve been experimenting over the summer and this semester with using a Linux laptop as my main work computer. I think I’ve reached the conclusion that it can be done, but there are a lot of glitches and workarounds when doing so on a campus that uses Microsoft everything. I’m not sure it is worth the trouble.

Motion Graphs 1 Human Motion Version 4.docx (69.1 KB)

#15

Apart from the occasional use of Heading 1 & 2, your document is an awful mess of direct formatting. And even your Heading n paragraphs are plagued with direct formatting. Vertical spacing is also done with empty paragraphs which could have been done the same with a mechanical typewriter.

Your case is rather desperate because a mixture of pictures (your hand drawings) which are controlled by a frame style and Drawing objects which have been manually designed and inserted in the middle of the text. Drawing objects are individual instances and no frame style can be applied to them. This means you must handle them one by one.


I tried various tricks to remove the border but the drawing was created by a separate application (the Navigator reports these objects as Canvas123) in which the border item is nit isolated from the curves of interest. Since I can’t eliminate the border (which does not exist as such), I turned the lines “white” and this affects all lines in the drawing: the curves, axis, … also disappear.

Either you find a computer equipped with Word and the graphical application for the drawings or you redesign completely your schemas in Draw. Don’t create directly drawing objects in Writer! It is better to create them in Draw (and save them separately), then paste them as a grouped object in Writer so that you can control them with a style.

And, please (also for your own peace of mind), use styles to format and layout your document. When I write styles, I mean all of them: paragraph, character, page, frame and list. Word has only a vague notion of paragraph styles.

#16

So this is what Writer produced by importing an existing Word document. I did not create it in Writer. The drawings, whatever they are labeled, were created using Word’s Shapes tool. So I guess this is what Writer produces when it translates docx. I tried the line color change trick and got the same results some time ago.

Is there a better way to get a docx into Writer without recreating the whole thing from scratch?

Thanks!

#17

It all depends on the amount of work you’re ready to dedicate to the task.

For a one-shot document (short-term life), go ahead with the automatic conversion. It does not really matter if it is approximate.

For long-term maintained (= receiving several editis, additions, …) documents, the ideal approach is to paste the text as *unformatted into a blank document. All formatting is wiped out. This implies you have to do it again. Take the opportunity to do it the “Writer-way”, i.e. with styles. If you have several documents to handle, create a template hosting all your styles so that this is done once for all and applied to all documents.

You may find it a hindrance to wipe out all formatting but it has the advantage that all “pollution” by Word primitives are also eliminated and your document gains stability and reliability. Otherwise, successive edits cumulatively damage it beyond repair.

The main issue is with “external” (non-text) data. You must recreate it in “compatible” formats. For graphical charts, you can use Draw or, if the chart results from numeric series or formulas, Calc (and you copy/paste the resulting chart). Some of your drawings can be made by Calc with all the power of this application.

#18

Thank you! That’s too much to take on in the middle of a semester so I guess I’ll revert to Word for now.

#19

You can remove these Canvas “frames” relatively easily. They aren’t frames but just a rectangle object in a group.

  1. Select an object with a frame
  2. Click Format > Group > Enter group
  3. Select the “frame” (rectangle shape) again and press Delete.
  4. Exit group

Or right click a Canvas object, select Enter Group, select the rectangle and press Delete

I don’t think they were created with Word unless it was through a Canva add-in

#20

Thanks! I’ll try that.

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