Hi everybody,
I have a problem with Writer on Ubuntu: when I open the dialog for a new paragraph style the dialog is too wide and cannot be resized. I have to drag the dialog along with the writer window in order to reach the sections or icons I need to use.
I looked for a solution on the net but didn’t find it.
Can anyone help me? Thanks a lot in advance.
Salvatore
“Hallo, Houston! We have a problem.”
In this case, Houston at least knew it was a spaceship named Apollo XIII. You only mentioned Ubuntu and no LO version. From your screenshot, it looks like you play with a dark theme. Dark themes are “in” nowadays but they create havoc in many applications.
Tracks to check:
hi @ajlittoz, thank you for your reply.
I have Libreoffice installed along with Ubuntu and it updates automatically; hereinafter you have all version data listed:
Version: 7.3.6.2 / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 30(Build:2)
CPU threads: 4; OS: Linux 5.15; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: it-IT (en_GB.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Ubuntu package version: 1:7.3.6-0ubuntu0.22.04.2
Calc: threaded
The user interface is dark but it’s inherited from Ubuntu’s setting. Anyway I tried to set Ubuntu to light interface and restarted LO. It worked.
Ok, then I tried to set the Ubuntu UI back to dark and again I restarted LO. GREAT! It still works!
Hope it will do also when I next start my pc.
In any case thank you very much.
Best regards.
Bad news! The problem is in the file! The dialog works well with a new file but the problem is back with the file I was working in 
I’ll try to see what happens opening the file on windows.
Is the file an .odt or a .doc(x)?
Is a .odt file and is unusually large 2826 kb.
Now I found some strange things in numbering styles:
there are a lot of numbering styles with a name like “WWNum1aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” with an increasing number of “a”.
I opened the .odt file with a zip manager and extracted the file styles.xml; it has a size of 1599 kb!
Just to explain: the longest one was WWNum1aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
The xml file took several minutes to open but I had to work this way since the styles to delete were too much and even opening the xml file with wordpad the deletion took a long time.
Now I opened the file in windows environment, the next thing to do is to open the file in Ubuntu and see what happens.
OK, I solved the problem. I opened the file in Ubuntu and it still works. I don’t know how I got those numbering styles but now they’re gone.
Sorry for bothering for a non-existing problem.
Styles like WWNum… are a clear indication that the document was originally a .doc(x) which was converted to .odt. The number of “a”'s shows it underwent numerous edits while still a .docx.
Both formats differ most in the way they handle numbering (in headings as well as in lists since both are ultimately numbered lists). Editing a foreign format is tolerable once or twice, acceptable if it is a “transmission conversion”, i.e. sending the document to recipients who absolutely can’t read the original format, but leads to very severe problems if it is routinely done because the “approximations” are cumulative and damage the document in the end.
You saw the overcrowding of the numbering styles, but have a look at the page styles: you probably have one style per page because Word has no notion of page styles. If there are fewer styles than pages, then edits were not that numerous.
You’re right, at least one passage in docx has been done. The file is still more than 2.5mb. My next try is to copy the whole text in a new native odt file and see if I leave all Microsoft stuff back.
Thank you again.
