[Impress] bullets disappeared from old presentations

raj001 · July 9, 2020, 7:48pm

Hi, I have on my disk quite a lot of old presentations from earlier versions of OpenOffice (.odp format) and even StarOffice (.sxi format). When viewed in OpenOffice on my old computer (OpenOffice 3.2.0, Ubuntu 10.04), they have nice bullets as in the following screenshot:

However, when viewed with recent LibreOffice (6.4.4.2) on Ubuntu 20.04, all these bullets disappeared and there are just paragaraphs of text one under the other, sometimes (but not always) with first line of the paragraph being “outdented”, as you can see below:

the same slide from LibreOffice 6.4.4.2

Is it possible - and if yes, how - to restore the old look? It’s annoying that presentations from older versions of the software get so distorted…

LeroyG · July 9, 2020, 8:24pm

Most possible a font missing.

You can check it choosing menu Format - Bullets and Numbering…, button Select… next to Character:.

raj001 · July 12, 2020, 5:21pm

No, it’s not the issue of font missing.
Bullet character is correctly displayed in the menu option you described, and also when I create a new presentation the bullets are displayed correctly.
Only in the old files read into LO the bullets are missing.

raj001 · July 12, 2020, 7:14pm

Also, when I switch to template view in loaded presentation, the bullets are visible, but on the actual slides they aren’t.

LeroyG · July 12, 2020, 7:24pm

@raj001,

Could you share files without sensible data? One old and one new. To do that, edit your question, and use the paperclip.

raj001 · July 12, 2020, 7:37pm

What do you mean by “one old and one new”? I have no new files for now (ie. created in new LO), I have only the old ones that load without bullets.

LeroyG · July 12, 2020, 7:46pm

Oh, yes. I got confused with the new version of LibreOffice used to open the files.

So, can you create a new file with similary bullets, for to compare both files?

raj001 · July 12, 2020, 8:21pm

I have added a one-slide test presentation created in new LO.

LeroyG · July 12, 2020, 8:50pm

@raj001, No files seen here.

raj001 · July 12, 2020, 9:10pm

I can’t attach them here because one was too large and the other was in .sxi format that is not accepted. I shared them at Index of /share/lo_issue . I marked it in a previous comment but now I see that the information disappeared.
The .sxi file is very simple so it’s probably easier to look at. Plus it wasn’t created by me, I obtained it from someone. For both files, there are also PDFs exported both from old OO and from the new LO.

LeroyG · July 12, 2020, 11:07pm

Comparing content.xml file I could find code differences between .sxi and .odp file formats related to bullets (properties & list-level-properties, and a few others). They could be manually changed, but it’s not easy.

An early version of LibreOffice (may be 3.6) could do the trick of saving the .sxi file as .odp rettaining the bullets.

I moved my “no” solution as a comment so the question become more visible (attract more people).

raj001 · August 3, 2020, 5:16pm

I filed this as a bug to LO. Resaving the document in OpenOffice 3.2 (I still have it on my old machine) is actually a workaround that preservers bullets. BTW: not only bullets are lost, but numbers in numbered lists as well.