When creating a Table of Contents, the page numbers go haywire INCREASING from 317 pages to 401 pages. Many, if not all, of the extra pages are blank. I have the TOC menu set to 5 levels (heading1 to heading 5). I’m checking the box for OUTLINE.
I’m using version 6.3.4.2 as Zotero extensions will not work with the Java runtime environment of later versions of LibreOffice.
Suggestions are appreciated. It’s driving me a bit nuts!
Thanks,
Stephan
Have you tweaked the Text Flow tab of Contents n? For example, is there a tick in Breaks requesting page breaks?
I hope than none of your headings has been touched by Zotero.
I you can’t find the cause, try to reduce your document to 1-2 pages with still a faulty TOC adding its load of blank pages and attach it.
Hi there,
Thanks for suggestion. I didn’t tweak flow.
When I copy even 11 pages of the doc into a new doc, I can insert the TOC and no extra pages are being added. I am going to try to copy the entire doc into a new one, create the TOC, and see what happens.
UPDATE: Creating a TOC for 44 pages is working correctly. However, when I copy and paste the entire 321 pages, I get the circle of death waiting for the TOC to insert.
Hmmmm, I am unable to re-create the problem with files under 100 pages. I did have this working correctly just yesterday. Although when I first tried creating the TOC last week, it was entering extra pages. I’m not sure what the key factor was here.
I’ll see if I can upload the doc to a shared location so you can check it out.
This smells like the beginning of document corruption. When you copy-paste into a fresh doc, things get tidied up a bit. I always distrusted Zotero (and the like) because they claim to be portable between suites and reinvent the wheel so as to remain portable. They don’t integrate with the general machinery because this would mean to be specific to a suite. The net result is a huge mess is data storing and formatting (notably many conflicts with the style system being replaced by direct formatting).
I agree. I detect doc corruption as the culprit. I have uploaded 100 plus page doc that reproduces the problem. In page preview, one can see all the extra blank pages inserted. I’m in something of a bind because the doc has 1000 plus footnotes and is over 300 pages. I’ve probably stretched libreoffice/zotero to the limits.
But perhaps you can ascertain the problem and a fix. Many thanks.
Sorry, I won’t spend much time on your document. It is not professionally formatted: nearly everything is Default Paragraph Style with direct formatting added everywhere (and very often not consistent), among others vertical spacing done with empty paragraphs instead of including it in paragraph style definition. The accumulation of direct formatting may contribute to your problem by artificially swelling the XML size.
Considering, the kind of simple footnotes, I think Zotero is overkill. You could as well have used the built-in footnotes or even the built-in bibliography feature. By the way, you seem to mix ordinary footnotes with Zotero ones as in the case of notes 241 and 242.
I also detected a spurious manual page break in the “Long Point Residents …” chapter.
This has nothing to do with the issue itself. From the TOC, I see you skipped outline levels (you never used Heading 3). There is no reason for that. All formatting can be tuned by customising the Heading n and Contents n families. I understand you start with Heading 2 implying that the first part is an unnamed Heading 1 but skipping level 3 doesn’t make sense.
I know it is a real pain but you should consider styling consistently your document even if it is already huge. And don’t take into account only paragraph styles, character, frame and page styles will save your life when later you tune the layout. Remember that styles describe the semantic significance of your text bits, not their visual appearance which come as a consequence of the significance, not the other way.
Thanks in any case. Yes, I know the styling was inconsistent especially in the sample doc . I did use heading 3 in the real doc.For this sample doc, I just copied and pasted one section multiple times exaggerating that issue somewhat.
I’ll go back and see if cleaning up the doc will help.
You’re absolutely right, I didn’t format paragraphs to leave a particular amount of space. I used a hard break.
I did add ordinary footnotes in areas where zero just couldn’t do. This is in particular true where I wanted to add a longer comment.
Thank you for your time though
Just wanted to let you know that I’ve begun restyling the doc, hopefully correctly. Most of the text body is now assigned text body style and the headings more semantic rather than visual. The TOC numbers in extra pages, but by scrolling through the doc with Print Preview, the doc reconfigured to the original # of pages.
(The TOC doesn’t have the correct page #s but i can live with it as eventually this will be handed over to a pro who can format – at least they’ll be working from a doc that is styled in a reasonable manner.) Thanks again
Please make sure that the people who will format your book, can import documents in the ODF format, including the more advanced features.
As I looked through your document (impressive), I noticed that you break paragraphs to accommodate pictures. That’s not a good idea. You should leave that to the final stage of page formatting by a pro, who has better tools to fit a picture in the middle of a paragraph.
You also have a problem with the captions with footnotes. It would be better if you could put the captions in a frame with the picture, but you can’t, sadly, have footnotes in frames, as you no doubt already discovered. Maybe you should discuss that with the person who is going to do the lay-out of your book.
Thank you for the suggestions! The photos are there as place as placeholders. I have the full size ones in folders or linked within zotero entries.
You are absolutely right. I did break paragraphs to put in the pictures. It made it easier to insert them. If I don’t use the paragraphs then I think I’ll have a problem with the captions. But I’ll go back and check. I probably could’ve used a table to enclose the image and caption with footnote, but that would’ve been a whole lot of work too. (I figured that since these are not the hi-res final photos to be inserted during the desktop publishing phase, I would just use these lo-res photos as placement indicators.)
(The file I posted was a sample copied and pasted about 10 times to show the problem with the formatting and the TOC. So it was even messier than the original. Unfortunately I was alas sloppy about setting up styles. I have had to go back through the document and clean it up. Still not perfect though.)
Thank you very much for pointing out the ODF format issue. I hadn’t considered that one. And thank you for the kind words about the work itself, As this was just a small sample of it.
I did at least set up a style for the photograph captions. Hopefully that will assist in the final product.
It’s not just the ODF format that might give problems. Some advanced page lay-out software just doesn’t import all features in some office software. Many years ago, I heard that manually inserted index item fields in Word documents weren’t imported by professional typesetting software (I won’t give names here). It’d be a pity if you do a lot of work in vain.
Oi vey, I have published one book and I had some major problems were the desktop publishing person kept inserting errors in the text. I actually counted up the number of errors that were attributed to me and something like 19 out of 20 of them were not in my original text. Lol.
I will keep your words of wisdom in mind. Zotero is handy but something of a pain when docs get large. Just yesterday I was unable to get it to add a new footnote.
I may have to divide this single document into chapters and make a master document. in the final product I will strip out all of those Zotero links so the notes are consistent.
If they ask for a word doc. hopefully I can export it correctly in the vanilla (no zotero ) format.
Beware that .doc(x) and ODF are not interchangeable formats. Inevitably, you’ll lose something when converting. So, double check.
PS: not sure to remember exactly, I kind of think you defined font face in some of your paragraph styles as Font1 ; Font2 in a way similar to what can be done in HTML/CSS to declare a priority-sorted list of fonts to use when the preferred one is not installed. I have tried this many years back but it doesn’t work in Writer and has rather adverse effects. You should fix your styles. If my memory is wrong, excuse me.
I have now defined the text body style and applied it to all regular text in the document.
Headings are now hopefully correctly organized in semantic order as I went back through and checked and changed them.
Photograph captions were already style “photograph”
So I’m at least working to clean up the style messiness.
When signing with a publisher comes, I’ll bring up the issue of document format.
Yes indeed, I’ll keep an eye out if I do odf to doc conversion. I would hope that most publishers at this point take Libreoffice format but who knows
You were right on target about the hard break before photos. THAT seems to be causing the problem in terms of extra blank pages. Now that the text body is correctly formatted, I’m going back and removing the hard breaks. This seems to be eliminating the extra blank pages.