How to turn off the preview of Sub-Documents inside Master Document?

Epsiluna · December 19, 2023, 7:04pm

Hello! I hope this is the correct place to ask this. I’ve found the Master Document very useful to organize the drafts of my book in an ordered index, but after 44 Sub-Documents (and still a lot pending to be added), the previews made the Master Document to reach 1000 pages and when I scroll down with the mouse-wheel or the side scrollbar, everything slows downs to a crawl or it becomes jumpy from page to page.

I was wondering if there was a way to make the previews of the Sub-Documents to be toggled off, because I only need to read the index and the headers that all those Sub-Documents have, I don’t have the need to read their contents right from the Master Document. I believe that by hiding the preview of the contents of the Sub-Documents, the Master Document will recover its health and the scrolling will be smoother again. Do you think this is possible?

Thanks for reading! (WIN10–64)

ajlittoz · December 19, 2023, 7:22pm

As usual, OS name and LO version is missing. I assume save format is .odm + .odt.

A quick answer to your question is “No”. A sub-document does no start necessarily on a page boundary and scanning the sub-docs is mandatory to correctly format and layout the master (think of heading numbering or field values based on variables or other dynamic state).

If you incur slow down, I would question your formatting. You probably direct format everything instead of applying styles in a systematic and rigorous way. Most of the times, users neglect character styles (for bold, italic, clour, size change, …) because there is no such concept in Word. Direct formatting is one of the causes of slow down.

Your concern seems to be with headers, which means you have a lot of page styles. Perhaps too many? Their number can be reduced if the header can be generated from data inside text, like chapter headings (once again, provided you apply the intended paragraph styles, notably those of the Heading n family). With fields giving a “dynamic” behaviour to the header, the number of page styles can be reduced to a single on for all chapters.

You mention 44 sub-docs and more in the near future. Are you sure you have ideally structured your book? You must find a balance between too fined-grained and too coarse a decomposition. A very detailed decomposition might be logically justified but multiplying the number of sub-docs has an impact on performance.

I understand you want to jump quickly to the index or chapter headings (to check the headers?). The Navigator is then your friend (but, once again and again, provided your headings are correctly declared as headings to Writer by using ad-hoc paragraph styles like Heading n and other custom styles for this usage). In the Headings section of the Navigator, you jump to the heading by double-clicking it.

Epsiluna · December 19, 2023, 8:15pm

The only header I use is the one at the top of each document (Header 1) so that they appears in the index of the master document.

There are other stuff in those drafts, like comments (from me and my proof-reader) and I tend to enclose in 1 cell tables all the inline annotations and other placeholder changes before I do clean-up of all that stuff once I tweaked those scenes with the info in those annotations. There are also a few inline pictures for reference of the backgrounds and other tools used by the characters.

Guess the problem is with the comments, the pictures and those 1x1 tables. No problem, I can live with it. I was just passing all my drafts from Word to LibreOffice and I wanted to index all of the .odt in a master document so that I can find them quickly by double-clicking the link in the Navigator, instead of using the explorer of Windows to eye-ball them.

ajlittoz · December 19, 2023, 9:41pm

I am afraid there is a vocabulary confusion here. A header is some data repeated at top of every page. There is no hierarchy; therefore the paragraph style is simple Header without level. A heading is an intermediate title which can be subordinate to some other. A heading has a level (between 1 and 10). A heading is automatically attached to a level by using the appropriate paragraph style Heading 1 to Heading 10.

What you call index is probably the table of contents (TOC).

Writer, like Word, has a comment feature, similar to Post-It™ notes, so that it displays outside text area. This could replace your 1×1 tables and avoid cluttering the document. But a better workflow is to enable Track Changes feature.

Note that Writer is much richer in formatting expressiveness that Word due to its character, page and frame styles. If you simply save your existing .doc(x) as .odt, you’ll head into serious problems because conversion is only approximative. One issue of the conversion is the frequent creation of one page style (named Converted999) per page. And this really results in slow down.
Converting from DOC(X) to ODF is not a trivial task and if not done adequately ends up with document structure damage after a variable number of edits.

In case you’re a newbie in Writer, I highly recommend you read the Writer Guide to see the differences between Word and Writer.