Inserting file into Master document misaligns the text of the file

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#1

Hello! I use LibreOffice writer to keep a daily journal. It’s getting to be over 1,000 pages now. (Each journal entry is limited to a single page.) I was excited to read about Master Documents because inserting my journal into a Master Document as a non-editable text element should let me be able to search my old entries while at the same time keeping the word processor quick and responsive to load. The journal has been going slower and slower as I have added more pages, for sure!

The problem…

When I insert my journal as a file into the Master Document, the page formatting gets wonky, so that part of page 10 starts to bleed over into page 11 and so on. Each journal is no longer on a single page. It’s been totally driving me crazy, guys! :cry: :sob:

I would completely appreciate and be super grateful for any advice that lets me insert my old journal entries into a Master Document while at the same time maintaining the one journal entry per page format that I had used so far. You have my gratitude! :blush: :heart: :heart: :heart:

#2

Are all conditions fulfilled to ensure a uniform appearance?

Styles in global- and sub-documents

And check your page breaks in the sub-documents.

#3

To be able to suggest an adequate solution, we need more understandable information.

Is it a single 1000-page document or a collection of 1000 1-page documents?
In the first case, turning to a master + 1 sub-document won’t give you any advantage. In the second case, the master feature was never intended for such a number of sub-documents. With regard to your journal, a “basic unit” of one month would make better sense. But even like that you might have problems managing your collection in the master. So, maybe a term Spring, Summer, Winter & Fall (like the title of a song of yesteryear) ?

Before embarking for master+sub-docs, you must master formatting through styles. Page formatting will get awry as soon as you have discrepancies in style configuration between master and subdocs. And you should consider all styles: paragraph ones to which everybody thinks, character, page which are probably responsible for the differences.
As soon as you apply direct formatting, you can be ~150% sure you’ll get mishaps in your formatting. Unfortunately, the majority of users consider direct formatting as more “natural” than style formatting (and we were conditioned so by Word workflow). Direct formatting is tolerable for 1-page throw-away one-shot documents, not for long-term maintained docs or collection.
The best way to keep consistency is to base every component of your collection (master + journal + subdoc) on the same template (warning, in LO parlance a template file is a reference document containing your styles set). This is another feature to master. And once you base documents on templates, this forbids absolutely any direct formatting in any of them lest you lose the global consistency.

So, give details about your journal; tell us how your documents are formatted.
And, as always, mention OS name, LO version and save format.

1 Like
#4

Hi! :heart: I’m on Windows 10, LibreOffice version information:
Version: 7.3.4.2 (x64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 728fec16bd5f605073805c3c9e7c4212a0120dc5
CPU threads: 4; OS: Windows 10.0 Build 19043; UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: en-US (en_US); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded

My journal is currently one ODT 1000 page doc. I dunno about maintaining a specific style because my direct formatting is kind of all over the place! :person_shrugging:

Since some of you were asking what the journal was like, I made a fake one to show how it works. I will try to send it through a dropbox link in my next post.

Thank you so much, 1000 times!

#5

Link to fake sample journal (ODT):

Link to fake sample journal (PDF):

#6

Unless you split your journal into several smaller bits for ease of management/backup/Idunno/…, you’ll gain nothing in wrapping it in a master. On the contrary you’ll create more problems.

Your case is desperate: absolutely no structure.

  • only direct formatting
  • faulty use of Default Paragraph Style which should be reserved for setting shared properties forwarded to all other styles and never applied to any text
  • excessive use of tables where a “simple” list would have done the job
  • frames without any real need (a judicious use of styles is a better solution)
    Remember frames are made for “out-of-band” annotations, similar to footnotes. This is correct for a picture but not the text for the picture. Said otherwise, the text is the main element and part of the flow. The picture illustrates the text; it is an optional accessory for it. It you fear misalignment of the picture with regard to text or some overflow, learn how to tame the various positioning, wrapping and anchoring options for frames (and store the “good” parameters into a frame style for later use).
  • vertical spacing with empty paragraphs
  • horizontal alignment with spaces
    The last two points are responsible for loss of page synchronisation when you manipulate your journal. At least you should use a page break between pages.

Frames and tables in such a number (over 1000 pages) put an excessive stress on Writer.


My recommendation: read the Writer Guide to improve your skills with Writer. Writer is based on styles which are not limited to paragraphs. They allow to separate contents from appearance. A fully resilient document (= immune to change of sheet format, size of daily contents – to the cost of eventually allocation a number of full pages to daily memo – and other “external” events) has no direct formatting.

PS: don’t use emoji. They are culture- and generation-dependent. Their meaning is not obvious for international audience. For instance, I didn’t understand what was meant after “all over the place!”.

#7

Person shrugging is the representation i get with a long press - whatever that helps.

#8

Thank you for sharing your perspective on emojis. :pray: From my experience, I like to use pictures to convey tone that can be missing from text exchanges but I can see how that could be not very clear in some circumstances. :sparkling_heart:

Thanks, also, for the detailed reply! Let’s get to it!

Okay, so my takeaways are:
1.) I thought master documents would be helpful in reducing the slowdown of my 1000 page journal. I was way wrong!! It’s a shame because, obviously, I’m not using all 1000 pages every single day. I wonder if there’s a way to have LibreOffice load only the 10 most recent pages unless I go searching through the document. That’s the thing… Obviously, I could just start a new journal to alleviate the slowdown but when I would like to search for a memory from a couple years ago, it feels more cumbersome to search through multiple journals. Plus, I dunno starting a new journal feels psychologically demotivating, if that makes any sense? :thinking: I like the idea of having a big book of everything! :heart_eyes:

2.) About using styles, am I correct in thinking that if I decided to use styles instead of all these tables the journal would load faster?

Thanks for taking the time! And your patience with my reply. This week has been crazy! :skull:

#9

With a systematic and consistent use (i.e. you forbid yourself any direct formatting), the total size of the document encoding is drastically reduced. With a 1000+ pages document this could make a difference on loading and saving. Also the simpler the structure, the more reactive Writer becomes. In your case minimising the number of tables and eliminating frames could solve the sluggishness. But this requires reformatting existing contents (a not very appealing task). I feel however you should consider this restructuring. The difference will be tremendous.

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