I have a writer document that is about 600 pages. I made pages as left pages and right pages as if to be in a book.
I arranged chapter start pages on right pages. But everytime I open my document, the pages slide. This is ridiculous. why doesnt the document stay exactly as I saved ? I save it, it looks good, then i close it… Then I open it, and i see that the chapter start pages slid (and of course other pages too). why is this happeneing? I am sick of seeing that the document pages doesnt look exactly as I saved the last time.
Please edit (don’t start a discussion, just improve your question) your question to better describe the situation. You can also add a screenshot.
Don’t forget to mention OS name and LO version.
why do pretend not to understand everytime I ask something? the question is very clear.
my OS is windows 10 and llibreoffice version is 7.1
and?
you have an answer?
and what screenshot ? I am saying, everytime I open the document, i see that the pages slid in comparison to what i saved and closed the last time. what screenshot are you talking about?
Why suspect something bad only because you believe that your question is clear? E.g., I don’t understand what “slide” might mean; and you may believe it’s clear only because you don’t even realize how many meanings it may have with LibreOffice - does the view shift? or content? as a whole or part? fixing at scroll (display artifact) or real formatting change? happening on saving to any format or to a specific one?
Only arrogant people may believe that they always are correct, their questions are perfect, and others asking for clarifications are nagging.
although my question was clear enough I repeat:
- the chapter start pages are on the right pages, and looks good
- I save the document and close
- I open it. And I see that the chapter start pages are not on right pages anymore. The pages slid (shifted, or whatever you want to call it). all by itself. So for example if a chapter start page was at 385th page when i saved and closed, now it is on 386th page. all by itself. it means other pages slid too of course.
Again: I edit and save a document and it looks good. Then I close it. Then I open it. And I see that the pages slid / shifted (any other synonyms in english?)
… OK, so “pages slid” is a way to describe that text (paragraphs) is positioned on a different place (even on different pages). OK, now that’s clear (but initially it wasn’t; e.g. “pages slid” may be expressing “my pages start showing in book view, so instead of one page, I see two pages side by side”).
But indeed you paid enough attention to the questions, and mentioned the file type that you use; and it’s only me not seeing the answer?
Among the many possible causes is the save format. Are you saving .doc(x), i.e. non native? This was not mentioned too.
it WAS clear from the beginning but you can think what you want
The format is the regular format of libre office. I am not converting to doc or anything
a regular libre office document. I edit it. It looks good. I save it. (again, yes, libre office document, yes, of course)
Then I open it again. And what I see? I see that a page which was on 385th page, is now on 386th page. All by itself. Nobody touched it in between the last save and my opening it now.
Done here. No wish to try to help such people. Starting to gather information to provide an advise/solution - only to meet such an attitude from someone who asks for help.
1 Like
I am glad you are done.
so because you are in this forum longer time than me, and you know libreoffice better, you have the right to call me arrogant (which I did not even reply to) and then repeat that my question was not clear, but I have no right to repeat that it was clear? And if do so, I become “such people” and I have attitude? look at yourself first,… you have not contruibuted anything anyway, and you clearly do not have an answer so why wasting our time on such dialogue.
If you don’t intend to provide technical description of what’s going on or the way your document is formatted (exclusively with styles, mixture of styles and direct-formatting, only direct formatting), don’t expect to get help. I’m done too.
what do you mean by technical description? so this can happen based on styling? how?
This is universal. When you save a document, and close it, and then open it again, it should come exactly the same as what you saved last time. No matter what file or even what program you use, let alone the styling, even if you did the most complex and ridiculous styling in the world.
all I can think of is that i pasted many content from word into this file, but now it is in this file and saved as a libre office file hundreds of times… plus i styled everything in libre office. and even if i didnt,it shouldnt matter…
anyway i will wait for someone elses answer if there is any…
i pasted many content from word into this file
This a very important piece of information. When you paste data from Word, you also paste Word formatting. A conversion occurs. Since M$ format and ODF are not the same (primitives have no exact correspondence), an approximation has to be done. This results usually in a format mess. You may temporarily fix the situation from buttons or others but as soon as you reopen the file, M$ idiosyncrasies pop back.
The only way to cleanly import data from Word is to paste unformatted and redo the formatting with styles so that no non-LO formatting remains in the file.
Well, this still should not happen because no matter what I pasted from word, i save it in a certain state and form. When I open next time it should come exactly the same. if it does as you say, opens differently than what you save, this is an issue to be fixed in libreoffice then.
I suspect the issue is something else though, as i kept checking the document now.
I have a lot of images in the file, some of which I barely, precisely fitted on pages. when i open next time, the ones i barely fitted, just did not fit anymore and slid… which caused that sliding of pages. what i will do is to make them not fit precisely, but i will leave some safety margins, by making those images smaller or cropping a little. then they will not keep overflowing that page when i reopen the document. of course this also seems like an issue of libreoffice which needs to be fixed… i will just make some images smaller or crop them now… or, may be the images do not fit anymore because of the reason you described. no matter what, making the images smaller will solve my problem. I do not have a chance to paste everything again, plus i edited further after pasting… by the way i styled everythin in LO but i did not paste as unformatetd text…
anyway i know what to do now…
so even if i formatted everything in LO the styling from word remained? how can i get rid of word styling completely in this document without pasting everything from beginning? i styled all text i pasted form word as default paragraph style. i have redone all bullet lists as LO lists again. I redone all titles as LO titles again… So I styled everything in LO. But how can I make sure word formatting didnt remain? Just asking for info otherwise i will make the pictures smaller and that will solve my problem
also you said MS formatting pops back but all fonts and everything look exactly the same as i formatted in LO and i open it again so there is no problem. so it is not like the ms word format is coming back everytime i open my document. all i see is that some pictures that precisely fitted before, do not fit anymore. which can be because of an issue related to pictures, or something from word popping back but all format looks the same including fonts titles, just the way i formatted in LO…
or i just thought of something else… as i said in the beginning, i wanted my chapter start pages on right side…now for the start of chapter 2, i had to leave a full blank page, to make it on the right side page. when i look now that blank page is automatically eliminated by LO. so now chapter 2 started on a left side page even if when i saved last time it was on a right side page. does LO do that? if so that is the issue then…
There are many questions in your last comment.
M$ Word formatting
The issue is not in M$ Word format by itself but into the avalanche of approximations needed to force it into ODF. Paragraph styles are not really a problem per se because Word also has paragraph styles. But for the rest of formatting, this is really very problematic because Word has no notion of character, frame, page and list styles. This results in many one-use-only styles. This is particularly visible on pages where practically every page receives a Converted999 page style.
Image positioning
One of the hardest task when you want reliable and predictable result without the need to manually adjust everything. For that you must create frame styles (don’t exist in Word) and take special care on the anchor (never use To Page unless you are in page-targeted document; usually you work in flow-targeted docs where text is the primary concern, not how the page itself). With carefully crafted frame styles, your image will follow the paragraph whatever happens to it (flushed to another page due to edits).
Getting rid of M$ Word formatting
Selecting the whole text and Ctrl+M is not enough because conversion added some structure (which is not formatting) to the text “architecture”.
To make really sure everything is cleaned up, start a new document and paste unformatted into it. This will not copy the images. The images will have to be pasted one by one. Take special attention to not copy any text simultaneously.
Formatting
i styled all text i pasted form word as default paragraph style.
This is wrong. In Writer, contrary to Word, Default Paragraph Style is a special technical style intended to set shared attributes among all other styles (unless overridden in specific styles). The “standard” style for text is Text Body.
Paragraph styling does not indicate how text is displayed. Text styles assign semantic attribute or value to a paragraph (the same can be said about other style categories such as character style). That is you give different paragraph styles to paragraphs with different importance (this is your author job).
After doing that, you tweak/tune the paragraph styles so that the semantic values can be distinguished. For instance, you wouldn’t name a character style Italics but Emphasis. Then *Emphasis is made italic. But if you change your mind and want it red instead of italic, you change the style and your semantic markup is still valid (Emphasis denotes emphasis, while Italics would no longer be accurate).
Avoid direct formatting. With direct formatting, your document is not manageable (all the more when it is 600 pages long).
Document outline
I redone all titles as LO titles again…
Using the Heading n style family?
You can customise Heading 1 to automatically force a page break before and switch to Right Page page style. This will guarantee that your chapters start in Right Page page style and then alternate with Left Page page style. Of course, this works if you didn’t change Right page only attribute in Right Page page style.
For best advice, attach a 5-page max sample file exhibiting the problem.
I was able to pinpoint and solve the problem because in my last 3 saves and reopenings things stayed the same as they were. Let me describe it to you and see what you think…
I had 2 images on lets say, page 141, occupying the whole page on top of each other, plus the caption text and a sentence in between. When I opened the file again, i saw that the bottom image kept overflowing to next page. And here is the strange part: It didnt matter how much I kept making the bottom image smaller. After I saved and reopened it kept overflowing. First I deleted the image and reinserted it. It didnt work. Then I deleted both images, and also the captioning in between. Nothing remained on that page now. So the content of my document before and after images were right after each other now, as if those images and their captions never existed. Then i pasted the captioning text I had removed as unformatted text, just in case. Then I inserted the two images. And I saved and closed. When i opened it worked.
Similar thing happened on only two more pages , with two more images. so, it did not happen on all images which I barely fitted to the pages.
So out of more than 250 images, of which may be I fitted 50 of them barely to pages, only a few had overflowing problems which caused the sliding of pages. And when I deleted them including their captions, and totally made the space they occupied disappear, and then reinserted them, now they do not present any problem. So the whole thing was happening because of a few images kept overflowing (and may be their captions or the space there had something to do with it).
Now based on this, would you agree that the problem was not because of MS word formatting “popping up” etc, since if that was the case, this would have happened everywhere? because most of the content was pasted from ms word but nowhere else is making this problem.
And based on what I described what do you think was the problem?
As I hinted image positioning is quite difficult, not only in Writer but also from a “practical” point of view. You must understand the relationship between anchor mode, wrap mode and other parameters.
I recommend To paragraph anchor mode as a default approach. You can modify it later for To character in case you want to position it precisely relative to some word or character inside the paragraph but it matters only if the paragraph spans a page break.
The most “inoffensive” wrap mode is None because it rejects any text before and after the image, making the image an “independent” entity.
An unfortunate change was brought in version 7.0 (or maybe in some 6.x) where Allow overlap is now checked by default, causing overlap of close images. Unchecking this parameter will allow automatic reposition of image to avoid overlap.
Position should be tuned in the Type tab of the image properties. For an image which is a companion of a paragraph, use Paragraph text area as a reference. For an image which is to be located always in the same position in the page (not changed when the paragraph moves higher or lower in the page), use Page text area as a reference.
Once you’re satisfied with your settings, record them in a frame style. Next image will be positioned and formatted only with a double-click on style name after selecting the image.
WARNING! When you caption an image, you create a text frame around the group image+caption. This is this outer frame which you should care for.
I can’t tell for sure if M$ Word formatting is the culprit. Word has no notion of frame style and everything (image-wise) ends up direct formatting. So the parameters may not be the optimal ones. Depending on the context, it may work or not.
In your case, both images may have the same anchor. This is the most difficult situation when positioning several images because they share usually the same reference point and live in the same rectangular area. I met this situation when implementing side notes (in addition to footnotes) in paragraphs with several side notes in the same line. It took a while to find the correct parameters in the style configuration so that I had no manual fix to apply to the frames.