Pilcrow 'open' changed my spacing? or What causes this bug i'm having?

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#1

There is this mark ¶ which works just fine :+1: i will call it normal pilcrow

But from times to times this one appears:
image will call it ‘open’ pilcrow
and substitutes all normal pilcrows in the document. It will usually dissapear if i close and reopen the document. This time it didn’t. :warning: Problem is once the ‘open’ pilcrow appears it somehow changes the arrangement of my text, i.e. spacing in the text lines an Tables looks different/longer, the document gets longer than what it originally was, pushing tables and images to the next page as if i added text above etc.

In my understanding this just appears ‘out of nowhere’ and i have no idea what’s causing it, what i clicked wrong or how to fix this. The Style of the texts seems to be the same as before and changing style won’t fix it.

I would like to troubleshoot this so my text changes back to how it was before (with normal pilcrows). Any help is welcome. Thanks in advance. :pray:

context: I am writing a big odt file (>100MB) and i have many images as tables with captions, page numbers, and different formatting for default text and captions. But all in all i use 3 formatting styles max. I always have the formatting marks open and just noticed this bug with the ‘open’ pilcrow won’t go away by save > close > reopen the file as usual. It’s driving me nuts because i have a deadline and cannot re-write or copy-paste the entire text to a new document.

follow-up edits:

OS clarification: Linux Debian LO 7.4.7.2

using plugin zotero for citations, thus it was suggested it may have something to do with its direct formatting changes

i am also using the ‘defaut’ paragaraph style, so it was suggested that this may have something to do with the changes/fix i get when opening older versions of the same file

#2

Mentioning your OS name and LO version would help.

I’ll try only wild guess. Pilcrow is displayed from the current font and current size. The different shapes may be a result of different fonts/sizes in these locations.

You say you have only 3 styles. I assume you’re talking about paragraph styles. What about character styles? IMHO, 3 styles for a “big” document is a bit under-powered. Consequently, you probably have a lot of direct formatting. Direct formatting is a direct speedway to formatting hell.

Select a sequence of words containing a paragraph mark (the pilcrow) and press Ctrl+M. Does it change anything? If yes, you have direct formatting.

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#3

sorry i forgot this. it’s on Debian 12

Version: 7.4.7.2 / LibreOffice Community
OS: Linux 6.1; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Debian package version: 4:7.4.7-1+deb12u5

Yes. I use ‘Default Paragraph Style’ and ‘Figure’ then also Heading 1, 2, 3 and 4 and keep the character style intact (keeping what the paragraph style dictates) not to avoid as much as possible the formatting hell you mention :sweat_smile: i also have list of tables, list of figures and index, so they have their own fixed formatting which i didn’t change on purpose and left the defaults

disclosure: i also use zotero LO plug-in to cite sources - if that makes any difference i think it follows the formatting of the text where I put the citation.

this didn’t have any difference on the document in question.

HOWEVER i did try it on an older version of the document which displays the normal ¶ (i keep multiple versions like v.1, 2, 3 etc progress-wise) and it opened a formatting menu on the sidebar. and out of nowhere again, VOILA the current (problematic) version of the document was fixed ! :tada:

So thanks for the help. This will be my troubleshooting from now on if this happens again. But out of curiosity if you or anyone else knows or can instruct me on how to avoid this bug, it will be awesome.

PS: so i guess i shouln’t mark your reply as the solution since it technically didn’t fix the issue per se, unless i opened the older (unbuged) version of the file and it did the trick.

PS.2: upon trying opening and closing the same file while i have another file open i can see it affects the pilcrow symbol and the spacing etc of the text. also depending on which one i open first both may change :fearful: is this magic, a superbug or what?

additional comment:

this is clear to me from the wikipedia page of the symbol
image

however, the issue is the styles doesn’t change when this happens, or at least it’s not evident on the side bar. the paragraph and character style stays the same on the rest of the text and before and after the pilcrow symbol (Default Paragraph Style & Times respectively)

#5

This is a fairly old version.
Try a current version to see if the problem persists.

#6

This is faulty. It is a “technical” used to define your preferred defaults (font face, size, indents, alignment, tab stops, …) shared by all other styles of your document. If you change something, it impacts all other styles. The intended style for your discourse in Body Text.

Zotero being multi-platform reimplements all formatting for its own use. As a consequence, Zotero formatting appears as direct formatting.

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#7

thanks for the concern but this is the version on the current (stable) debian repository, i.e. this is the official version for my OS. also i am not going to do a major jump on updates (from 7 to 24) while i am working on a large project. finally, since i don’t have this issues with any other files, or at least i don’t recall it ever happening, i don’t see the version being relevant to the issue.

ok, Body text then. thanks

ok thanks for the info. although it won’t work (the plug in i mean) if i try and save on a different file type, i.e. docx

i guess it doesn’t affect the current issue. i write with the zotero plug in all the time and as far as i recall i don’t have this ever, it’s first time i see the formatting changing on it’s own without even being evident on the side bar. i will take notice and try to see if using the zotero plug in triggers it. if that’s it i will report back in here.

However, i have to say that since the formatting isn’t truly changing (based on the side bar info, like font, font size, text alignment, spacing, etc) then i have no clue why the normal pilcrow and the spacing of my text changes at all.

additions/edit:

i see how this could be the issue here. so me opening older versions and changing this may affect the new version since the default is shared. and if something is changing the default it may not be visible to me (on the info on the side bar) but only through the pilcrow symbol change and the overall document lengths/breaking of tables moving down etc. :thinking: this is very interesting. i should change formatting to a document specific instead of ‘default’, however is I didn’t change formatting from older to newer versions, and as i am working on the manuscript the change happens “on its own” then i wonder if i shouldn’t change the formatting so to have the previous versions as a back-up plan :sweat_smile: (that’s it until i finish working on this project - the next should be done with a dedicated style from the start)

#8

This is an interesting aspect.
Try the following:
Open your large file (no other files) and look in the status bar on the left at the page and page count display. Do nothing else and observe whether the number of pages changes.

I already had to deal with a similar case with a large file and many inserted areas that kept causing problems.

#9

bugged file is 166. while yesterday (previous file version) i left it at 157 and changes made since are less than 1 page. so yeah as i said the doc gets longer. however the style spacing is 0.14 on both old and new versions :sweat_smile: no clue really. maybe it’s a tables issue or a zotero issue.

fortunately i have a new version which is fine (until it isn’t) after the fix provided from @ajlittoz :heart:

PS: @Hrbrgr do you use any plugins such as zotero or similar or the inserted areas where manual?

#10

No any plugins such as zotero, no macro.

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#11

was hoping you would say yes so we can pinpoint the origin there or something :sweat_smile:

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#12

That would be my policy too. But just for information: The “jump” is not so big. It is simply a change in numbering to use year.month now. So 24.2 was the direct succession of 7.6.7 as can be seen in the archives
https://downloadarchive.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/old/

2 Likes
#13

thanks for clarifying! it seemed odd that debian would be 24-7= 14(!) versions back lol. even for debian stable that’s too much heh ^^

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#14

image

Since you use version 7.4, I assume that the “this mark ¶” was in fact more like “image”, i.e. with blue-ish color, not black. So I assume, that what is suspicious is the shape of the pilcrow, which obviously looks like using a different font.

And my suspicious would be, that there is some problem in LibreOffice’s font management, caused by something in your document, which breaks the assignment of fonts to parts. I don’t know what that could be; I don’t know if that is OS-specific or not. But I would definitely check, if that is version-specific - I mean, your

is strange-looking, because new versions sometimes incorporate bugfixes, which sometimes fix bugs :wink:

Of course, since you seem to have it working now, please by all means first finish the time-pressing project. But checking a newer version would still be a reasonable next step. And maybe filing a bug report, too (if you can provide the document, and it still misbehaves in a current version).

#15

correct

correct it seems like a different font, however as i described above the font isn’t actually changing (based on the info provided from the side bar). that’s why it’s a mystery to me. the only indications i have are the length of article (text moving further down than where it was before, tables breaking page even if they didn’t use to, etc) and the presence of the ‘open’ pilcrow.

after looking around in my document what you say here gave me an idea so i think i have a hint. i started this project some months ago but if i recall correctly i have copy-pasted some text from a differently formatted document and i think i used [*]formatted paste to keep some subscripts/superscripts intact. so now if i look at the paragraph style options on the side bar i see there are some additional styles from the MS docx template i was using on the previous project (even though i am not using them now). could it be that the transfer of text brought the styles with and this cross-over is causing the issue? it would explain why i haven’t observed such an issue in previous projects, even though i work with big documents mostly.

another idea would be that as i was working on this project, i opened a different one from a colleague who used MS and doc file types, so maybe the ‘Default Paragraph Style’ i am using got…confused? as @ajlittoz mentioned it’s a shared style so if their default is different it could play a role right? i am just theory-crafting at this point.

if it was a known bug (fixed or not) then i guess someone will state it and i will thank them deeply. until then nothing suggests it’s a version issue. also forgive me if i am being too up-front on this; my background in troubleshooting is in linux forums where normally criticizing OS or versions choices when someone has an issue and asks for help is discouraged unless it’s the only reasonable/proven solution. thanks for understanding :pray:

if this persists i will definitely. may i assume bug reports are only valuable for current versions, correct?

PS: thanks again everyone for your responses and help

[*] edited a misleading typo, thanks @ajlittoz for spotting it :pray:

#16

Lol. If I myself knew every time, when changing code, what I fix collaterally. Sometimes I get notifications like ‘bug x was also fixed by this’ after a few years. No matter what the background is. Here checking with an up-to-date version is a good first step.

EDIT 2024-11-18: Just a random day today, just some commit log: Log - 7afb836b23c286eac4605ef4d98cf517f825b8d8 - core - Gitiles

crashtesting: crash on import of rtf exported from forum-en-32886.odt
…
crashtesting: use after free
…
cid#1607833 Overflowed constant
cid#1607905 Data race condition
…
cid#1607919 Overflowed constant
…
tdf#163486: PVS: V614 Uninitialized variable used
Give DocumentEventHolder (aka EventHolder) a key function

… and so on …

All these (and lots of others) are not specific bugfixes; rather, they are something found by the continuous testing (of a large body of test documents, in crashtesting), or static analyzers (Coverity, PVS) - or even just some code reading, and proactive fixing (as in the last case). We don’t really know what specific real-life bugs will be fixed by all these - even the people who actually fix such a code. And of course, when someone else here sees your problem, they are even less likely to know, if it was or wasn’t fixed by some of these - or by hundreds of actual bugfixes, coming every month.

Just to illustrate the point.

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#17

amazing :laughing:

then i guess in a forum for troubleshooting on one suite it’s easier to say update your version than it is in a forum troubleshooting a group of different flavors of OS lol thanks for sharing this forums pov. then if no one has any other ideas in 1-2 days then the issue can be closed unless it’s better to stay open until debian pushes the update on the stable repo and i try it out and report back. :v:

#18

We don’t say ‘upgrade’. We say ‘check’. We don’t claim it’s definitely a version problem, but it might be, and the Ask site for the single suite lacks human-power available at place dealing with operating systems, but has an advantage of the different version test being much easier compared to OS upgrade.

#19

Perhaps it should be mentioned that a current version of LibreOffice can also be downloaded here:

#20

yes i get that. after you said it on the reply before it kinda seemed obvious right away. thanks again for the pov and overall help :pray:

also to clarify i am not judging the process suggested, i am just trying to permanently fix my issue here and most importantly understand what i did wrong in the first place because i think it’s more likely something i did caused it :sweat_smile: (see theory-crafting part in this reply above). also i truly don’t know if i could even check in a different computer. because it would require my set-up in order to reproduce conditions (LO but on latest version + zotero install + zotero plug in + loging in to sync my library + the fixed document) and i would need to work on it like 10 hours straight or something, because this bug appears sporadically and i cannot trigger it to check if it will happen in the latest version (i don’t know how to reproduce it exactly, hence the “it happens on it’s own” i wrote)

thanks for your input :v: is a dual install of different versions of LO even possible or will it mix my preferences etc? anyway i wouldn’t mix my system with older and newer versions in the middle of a project just to be safe.

also worth mentioning for any future reader: debian has a backports version for a more recent version of LO (v. 24.8.2-1). however for my case this never seemed necessary to get the latest (since LO worked flawlessly with the stable version so far :heart:) and mixing repos would mess up my system more that i am inclined to right now (especially since i got burned once in the past from mixing repos).

#21

It is basically possible:

Installing several versions of LibreOffice in parallel

Alternatively, you could also upload your file to the cloud somewhere and post the link here or send it directly to a person in confidence, e.g. @mikekaganski .

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