I have a policy manual I have created for a club that includes the master and a large number of sub documents. I recently included a new sub document that was created from a .docx file (opened with Writer and saved as .odt). The sub document contains a number of lists, both ordered and unordered. When editing it with Writer everything is correct, but when I include it into the master document, some of the unordered lists become ordered.
What do I need to do to correct this?
And is there a way to prevent this if I need to include other documents converted from .docx files.
Oh that’s a disaster. What you write means, that there are other documents in your set, that are created from DOC(X) (maybe even the master itself); and the master documents are completely built around styles: the main idea of master documents is “master defines the common styles’ formatting”.
What likely happens in your case is: the document uses converted styles for the lists; and the converted styles are named automatically, numbered sequentially. Other document(s) also contain numbering using converted styles; and there, the styles are also named automatically and numbered sequentially, but the sequence there is different - meaning that same-name styles in different documents mean different styles. And here comes the clash.
You just cannot use “random garbage” (=document with styles generated in random, like from conversion; sorry for the wording - it is there to emphasize it from the system point of view) in master documents, without such problems.
To elaborate on @mikekaganski’s explanation, note that DOCX knows only of paragraph styles, nothing else. When converting, most formatting are “translated” to direct formatting which is a hindrance but does not cause serious problems unless you want to tune formatting. What is outside “most formatting” relates to pages (where in extreme cases you end up with one page style per page) and essentially lists with creation of both list and character styles (with random names as pointed out).
Whatever the application, always work in “pure” native format, here .odt. I added “pure”: saving a DOCX to .odt is not enough because Writer will try to keep the visual aspect without consideration for document structure (because it can’t guess author’s intent). Using the master+subs feature assumes that all documents have a consistent structure, which is only possible from a careful manual organisation based on styles.
Thank you both for the responses.
I guess therefore, I must go through the affected file and reset the styles for each line/paragraph/list/etc. to utilize the styles from my template document.
And remove all formatting when attempting to repeat this if I have to repeat for a similar effort in the future.
Have a happy new year.
DanC
ajlittoz
December 29
To elaborate on @mikekaganski’s explanation, note that DOCX knows only of paragraph styles, nothing else. When converting, most formatting are “translated” to direct formatting which is a hindrance but does not cause serious problems unless you want to tune formatting. What is outside “most formatting” relates to pages (where in extreme cases you end up with one page style per page) and essentially lists with creation of both list and character styles (with random names as pointed out).
Whatever the application, always work in “pure” native format, here .odt. I added “pure”: saving a DOCX to .odt is not enough because Writer will try to keep the visual aspect without consideration for document structure (because it can’t guess author’s intent). Using the master+subs feature assumes that all documents have a consistent structure, which is only possible from a careful manual organisation based on styles.
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Be aware that DOCX idiosyncrasies may still be lurking (because your file structure is impacted). The only way to really reset things clean is to paste as unformatted text in a blank document so that no Word hidden fossils are kept. Then you apply styles.
My best advice when playing with master+subs is to base all documents on the same template (in Writer parlance, a template is a special document with extension .ott; this is not the same as what laymen call a “template” = an ordinary skeleton document with default contents to be patched for specific usage). By default, you can’t create a “templated” master. Create it as usual then use Template Changer extension to link it to your template. Though the description says this extension is compatible with LO 5.0, it is still valid with present releases.