Imported canvases from word turn into uneditable bricks

English
#1

I have documents I imported from word .docx format. I am leaving them in .odt format based on online recommendations.

After the import, several issues were observed:

  1. Some of the line objects are missing.

  2. The canvas objects are now bricks. I can’t appear to select or access individual objects within the canvas. If you select the canvas, the whole canvas is selected. I can’t select components within the canvas, although libreoffice appears to know about them. If you move the canvas, individual objects are outlined, including the missing lines within them. I would assume they need to be ungrouped, but going to format/group gives the group/ungroup/enter group/exit group menu as greyed out even with the canvas selected.

Thanks,

Scott Franco
San Jose, CA

#2

Please state the operating system you are using, the LibreOffice version (four digits).
And upload a sample file with the problem here, so that someone can examine it. Remove any sensitive data beforehand and replace it e.g. with “XXXX”. Thank you.

#3

Ok, but I’m not submitting a bug report here, I’m just trying to find out how to access objects within a canvas, most likely using ungroup.

#4

You are using Word terminology and feature, canvas, so we can’t be sure what you are talking about.

My guess is that it the background of the “canvas” has been converted to a shape. If you select the “canvas” and click Format > Arrange > To back*, or maybe To background, does it resolve your issue?

Copy the “canvas” to Draw where you can Enter the group or Ungroup to edit the drawing. Copy the edited drawing back to Writer. After that, you can right click on the group and Enter group in Writer to add or rearrange as desired.
Canvas.odt (15.5 KB)

#5

Thanks for your answer.

  1. Don’t know, its just what showed up in the document (canvas).
  2. It shows up in the libreoffice index under “drawing objects”, Canvas 8.
  3. I selected the Canvas 8 object, it shows green squares on the corners.
  4. Copied it.
  5. Pasted it to draw (I assume libreoffice draw).
  6. It shows up there as a blank square, selected with green squares on corners.

Sorry, that’s pretty much it. I have been assuming that I am going to have to redo all of the
drawings from the original document. FWIW, if I leave the original in .docx format, and use
libreoffice, it is better.

#6

Ungrouping in Draw worked for me, you might need to just Enter Group and Arrange the blank square to the back.
Can you provide a one page sample?

#7

Tried that (send to back) in draw, no help. Interesting when I click the blank square in draw, it lights up with all the internal objects there, its like they are all set to white or invisible. I saved the .odg, and attached it here.

test1.odg (9.0 KB)

#8

It is easy enough to give all the objects a line so they are visible but there have already been a number of transformations. Do you have an original one page docx sample?

#9

Its huge (400 pages).

#10

I’m going through the drawings and redoing them. I think that is the most expedient thing.

Thanks for the effort.

#11

In Draw you can just select the object and in the Sidebar > Properties select the Continuous line to apply it to every object in the group

ApplyContinuousLine
ApplyContinuousLine1080×756 18.2 KB

You should report a bug, How to Report Bugs in LibreOffice - The Document Foundation Wiki

#12

The biggest issue with libreoffice is that it does not appear to save attributes of things. If I save in one color, it comes back as another. If I save in a given drawing order, it comes back from the file rearranged. If I wanted them to work on anything, it would be that.

#13

It sounds like either a problem in the converted file or a problem in your user profile in LibreOffice.

#14

Heres something you might know. I have 400 pages of headers. It seems every chapter is different after convertion. Each header reads “converted10” or converted11, etc. How do I get them back to one header? So I don’t have to edit 400 headers?

#15

I found the menu. I have 75! different “converted” headers and footers.

#16

Needless to say, the original .docx only had one.

#17

@samiam95124
Why are there compatibility issues?

#18

I don’t want to change 75 different headers! Actually, 150, since headers and footers are different. In word, I had one header one footer. Now after convertion I have 150. I found how to change the headers back to “default header/footer style”, but I still have to repeat that 150 times.

#19

The reason for this multiplication of Converted999 is M$ Word has no abstraction beyond paragraphs. Everything else is done either as one-of-a-kind formatting or through a proprietary not-reverse-engineered mechanism. It also looks like there are “strong” markers at page breaks. When your document is converted (at load time and at save time if you keep it as .docx), Writer must translate these “hints” (at least for itself because its document encoding format is different) into its primitives. This results in creation of single-occurrence character and page styles because Writer can’t infer from the document encoding that page x (with Convertdx) is in fact the same semantic layout as page y (with Convertedy), which would allow style merge.

Most of the time, the best approach is to start from scratch or from a blank document where you paste text as unformatted. You (re)create the styles after that: paragraph, character, page, list (and frames if there are illustrations). This is the only way to rebuild an un-distorted structure.

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#20

Word has two kind of “canvas”, the “locked canvas” and the “drawing canvas”. The latter is available in current Word versions via Insert > Shapes > New Drawing Canvas. This Drawing Canvas is inserted as group in Writer.

The default anchor setting for a “drawing canvas” is “inline” in Word. That corresponds to the anchor “as character” in Writer. And you cannot enter a group anchored “as character” in Writer. That is a bug, but I cannot find a bug report.

There exist several problems with groups in Writer. So the suggestions to copy the group to Draw and repair it there might be the best way for you. If you do not want to use Draw you need to change the anchor to “to character” to be able to edit the group.

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