Length and images (I think) keep any doc from opening since crash

English
#1

I’m on Linux Ubuntu. I’m new to it and LO. LO was working pretty well until I tried to add images. There was no warning (that I saw) about 450 pages being a lot and enough to cause instability.

When I began having crashes I thought i was incorrectly adding images and that was the problem.

Today I got conflicting notices, saying LO was recovering my doc, and saying it had recovered it.

I tried to save the whole doc “save as” but I don’t think anything happened.

When I was able to open a bit of the recovered doc, the headings were a mess.

Sigh, I don’t know about the new site. Basically, I’m old and I have a brain injury, but my writing was going very well… until…

#2

Did you save as .doc or as .odt?

I always save images at final size and resolution and Insert - Image to add it to my document. If you paste images, they will be saved as .PNG which could dramatically increase file size.
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You can turn off display of images to reduce resource requirements

#3

Thanks. I’m pretty worried. I saved .odt
That’s good to know about paste, are you saying the images could be saved in ODT? How do you chose the save… can I save ODT after pasting
or, how do I avoid pasting?

Right now I can’t get into anything… like my 450 page manuscript

#4

That’s great. It is native format so no conversion is required and there are no losses from multiple conversions.

Unless you have chosen to link images, they are saved in the file.

  1. Save the image to a folder.
    Typically photographs are best saved in jpg format but graphs and line drawings are better saved as svg (vector) or png (reduce to 256 colours if you can). Work out the physical size of the image and don’t go larger than 300 dpi unless you have very good reasons.
  2. In the menu click Insert > Image, navigate to and click the file, click Open.
    Or you can open the folder in a file manager and drag the image file onto the page.

If this is the only copy of your manuscript that you have then, right now, you need to copy* it in your file manager to somewhere safe.
It might be that there is still a backup file of the original still existing, look in Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Paths to see where backups are located. Open a file manager and navigate to that folder. The backup will have the same name as the original but will end in .bkp. Copy that file to an easily accessible folder then open LibreOffice and see if you can open the backup file.
This page has some useful pointers, Preventing Data Disaster

#5

With this size, I hope you apply styles and ban direct formatting. Notably, people tend to neglect character styles because they don’t exist in M$ Word. Direct formatting results in inserting repeatedly the formatting directives at point of use instead of “common factoring” them when you apply styles. This causes a huge increase in document size (at least when it is decompressed in memory). And there is also a performance degradation.

Adding images without precaution to a document lacking style strictness increases the risk of instability. Precautions are:

  • prepare images outside Writer (pixel density, scaling, cropping, format, …) so that the image is used “as is” without any transformation by Writer (already mntioned by @EarnestAl )
  • apply frame styles to the images instead of positioning them manually
    This requires abstracting enough the role of the images (their “semantics”) relative to text. But frame styles are the most difficult category among styles. They are very difficult to master and are excessively sensitive to direct formatting (DF). DF is a real plague on frames and it is next to impossible for a newbie to get rid of it.

Could you provide a very short sample (less than 5 pages) of your document to give an idea about your formatting?

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