Undoing LO Writer **

[TBotNik]

LO Writer is such **, constantly changing things by itself, never taking and holding defaults, always in illegal font and format and today takes the cake!

I document that I created about 4 years ago and was formatted perfectly, needs a legal paragraph added, so opened the file and saw nothing. Looking around I found my 1st page was way off to the right and further investigation, showed that page 2 had recreated itself as 17 inches wide and 2 column.

Looking for any formatting commands or parms I found none. I went to the irc.freenode.net and entered on the #libreoffice channel, with no response. The fact that LO is constantly wrong and constantly changing things by itself is so frustrating. I am constantly spending hour after hour correcting it’s **, since I write for a living, but no clue on fixing this.

I suppose one solution would be a “New Document” with all the old content added via cut-n-paste, but the way LO Writer always changes any cut-n-paste, has me totally skeptical.

Cheers!

TBNK

[Ratslinger]

Edited to remove unnecessary abbreviations. Please respect that this site is used by all age groups and backgrounds of peoples.

Thank You.

[mikekaganski]

entered on the #libreoffice channel, with no response

Heh. From the channel:

[ajlittoz]

If you expect any response, give facts!

From guess: you enabled book view. This is not Writer initiative but user action (even involuntary).

For the rest: how do you use Writer? Like an old fashioned mechanical typewriter? Like a professional author, exclusively with styles (considering your rant, I doubt it)?

How do you save the files: .doc(x) or .odt? I’d bet for alien format (.doc(x)) where you incur double conversion and loss of information every time you edit your document. For sure, this changes formatting due to the shortcomings in underlying principles in .doc(x).

Have you read the Writer Guide?

[mikekaganski]

@ajlittoz:

How do you save the files: .doc(x) or .odt?

your guess is definitely correct, given the

Do I have to start a new docx file …

on IRC

[anon87010807]

Is there any point in keeping this topic? The AOO forum was always somewhat lenient toward ranters, but as this isn’t a real forum, deleting this isn’t a big loss.

[ajlittoz]

There is a real problem in the way OP uses Writer (and probably any document processor). I suspect he never went past the old mechanical typewriter and is probably too lazy to open any book about modern tools. I want to make sure he is the type of guy requesting “intuitive” approach to writing, i.e. a tool fitting his routine, never questioning if it is the right or efficient way.

[TBotNik]

ajlittozl,

You’ve obviously never been on the “needing help” side of things or you would not even think this let alone post this!

[TBotNik]

How do I save my files, why .docx always of course, and found that LO Writer is so flaky, that I can never ever send any .docx to anyone using MS Word as the doc is so mangled by LO Write that the recipient, cannot read the doc, so always have to export as a .pdf and then send that!

At least the export to .pdf works correctly!

[TBotNik]

Mike Kaganski,

Please read! I enabled nothing. LO Writer is constantly, and I mean constrantly, as in forever constantly changing my documents. Open Office is also the same core so it is not alternative and I’m 100% Linux so stuck with this crap. If there was a viable alternative, I’d be there. Can’t believe the no level of testing, when the testing mandate has been required legally since 1992!

Also as I stated there are no format markings showing why and how this “book mode” you said it’s in is turned on and that should never be in the “edit mode” but only in a preview mode.

One thing I forgot, that I posted in irc.freenode.net#libreoffice, in describing this, is though the page is showing 17" x 2 column the page format shows 8.5" wide.

I will however look up the “Book Mode” as a suggestion and see if there is a remedy or way to turn that off!

Cheers!

TBNK

[ajlittoz]

This ain’t no solution to your question and should be reposted as a comment (see the more link at bottom of your “non-answer”. If you want a technical analysis on your document, edit your question to attach it (“paperclip” tool). Max 3 pages. Make sure it still exhibits the problem after shrinking it and eventually anonymising it.

You have not yet answered about OS name and LO version, as well as save format.

[TBotNik]

Sorry, forgot this info in my anguish!

OS: Kubuntu 18.04 LTS

LO: Version: 6.0.7.3

Build ID: 1:6.0.7-0ubuntu0.18.04.10