Images and drawing objects: arrangements are lost after reopening the document

Crash1602 · April 17, 2025, 8:55am

Hello,

I’ve been in the process of switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice over the past few weeks. Most of my Excel spreadsheets migrated to ODS without any major issues. However, I’m running into some problems with a few ODT files that were originally saved as .docx.

Specifically, I’m having trouble with the positioning of images and drawing objects. I’ve already set the anchors and arranged everything so the images and drawing elements appear correctly. Once I save the document, everything looks fine. But when I close and reopen the file, things start to go wrong randomly.

Sometimes the background just disappears and turns completely white instead of showing the intended image. Other times, graphics that are supposed to be in the header background jump to the front or end up hidden behind the background. In the footer, I have three text boxes on top of a background image—and occasionally one or two of the text boxes will just vanish.

What’s even more confusing is that these issues don’t show up consistently across all pages. For example, the first 10 pages might look perfect, and then on page 11, a graphic is missing again because it’s been pushed to the background. I can’t figure out why this is happening—it all feels so random.

At this point, I’m honestly stuck and hoping someone out there might have a tip or some advice. This issue is currently holding up my full migration to LibreOffice.

Example

Footer after saving and arranging everything correctly:

Footer after closing and reopening the .odt file:

I’m having the same issues even when I open and save the .docx file directly in LibreOffice :-/

Thanks in advance!

My Version

Version: 25.2.2.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 7370d4be9e3cf6031a51beef54ff3bda878e3fac
CPU threads: 16; OS: Windows 11 X86_64 (10.0 build 26100); UI render: Skia/Vulkan; VCL: win
Locale: de-DE (de_DE); UI: de-DE
Calc: threaded

Hrbrgr · April 17, 2025, 9:57am

A few basic comments on migration:

My Migration from MS-Office to LibreOffice

Upload a reduced anonymized sample document here where the problem exists so someone can look at it and examine. Thank you.

English documentation

Crash1602 · April 17, 2025, 11:52am

Hello Hrbrgr,

thank you very much for your message. I have anonymized the original document a bit. In parallel, I also took a few screenshots showing the correct and incorrect states.

My guess is that it might have something to do with the document size or something similar — that when opening the document, the information about the layout isn’t loaded quickly enough.

In my recent test, everything was fine for the first 8 times I opened it, but on the 9th time, the background image on the first page was gone.

I hope the error can be reproduced using the reduced document.

Here is a Google Drive link to a ZIP file. Unfortunately, I couldn’t upload it here because the file was considered too large, even at 2MB.

Password ZIP-File: LibreOffice#2025

Thanks for investigate!

Hrbrgr · April 17, 2025, 2:59pm

The first page does not have a colored/checked background with me.

Distribution of page styles to the pages:
1-2 Standard
3-83 Converted 1
84 Converted 2
85 Converted 3

Improvement - it would make sense to divide them into:
1 Erste Seite
2 Inhaltsverzeichnis (to create new)
3-84 Standard
85 letzte Seite

You need a separate page styles for each page that is to be different.

attached as sample with 5 pages

Improvement - About the graphics:
For the first and last page, combine the graphics into one image in Draw.
Do the same with the header ~~and footer~~.

Do not use separate text fields for the footer, but insert the text directly.

Example one Graphic for the first page:

Example ODT with Page styles:
MagentaCLOUD

Example ODG create one Graphic for the first page
120962 HB Example_LO-Forum.odg (734,2 KB)

Addendum:
Some text objects are in the background (Page 1 and last Page).
They can only be deleted via the Navigator.

Recommendation
Rebuild the file completely in Writer.

EarnestAl · April 18, 2025, 4:38am

I think you have 4 different pages styles, Front page, TOC, Default page and Final Page.
You can group the objects with the grid and create a png (or jpg) that is inserted in the Area tab of the page style.
With just the grid, you could take a small piece and tile it as I did for First Page and Final Page. The images I just locked for Size and Position (right click Properties > Position and Size > Protect). Because they are on only the first page and last page you don’t need to worry about wrapping or text flow.
[Edit]
Those images don’t need to be protected at all if you aren’t adding any more text to the page.

I cleaned up the paragraph styles a bit and put them back where they should be. Note the the paragraph style for the body of the document should be Body Text, not Default Paragraph Style, that is there to make global changes, such as changing from Calibri to Liberation Sans, not to appear in the document.

Konzeption.odt (796.1 KB)

You might like to refer to the chapter on styles in The Writer Guide, I think this is the German link Handbücher | LibreOffice Documentation - LibreOffice User Guides