Word documents now opening in draw

English
#1

All of a sudden my odt and pdf documents are opening in draw. This has never happened before. Some documents are overwritten with text making it unable to read document, also red lines under words. In draw unable to choose to print odd or even pages. Have changed to open in write but opens in draw. The odt documents do open in write.
As mentioned this has never happened before.

What is going on. I have tried to change pdf files to open in write in Windows settings but can only choose draw.

How do I get rid of documents opening in draw.

Frustrated Allan

#2

Try to start LibreOffice in safe mode (menu Help) or rename the office user profile for autogenerating a new one - UserProfile - The Document Foundation Wiki

#3

That is the default action. A PDF consists of rows of text (interpreted as single line text boxes in Draw) positioned on a page and images positioned on a page. There are no styles, right pages, mirrored pages, etc, just pages with objects positioned on them.

That pretty much describes how Draw works. If a font used in the pdf is not installed on your computer then a substitute font will be used. The substitute font may not have the same metrics as the original so the “text boxes” might overlap or run off the page.
It is best if pdfs open in a dedicated reader like Adobe reader.

If you want to open a PDF in Writer then export it as a Hybrid PDF with a Writer document embedded within. To open such a pdf, open LibreOffice and then open the pdf from there.

#4

If your .odt documents open in Draw, their contents has been “damaged”. LO does not use file extension to select the processing component (Writer, Calc, Draw, …). Instead it reads the beginning of the file to guess its nature. Draw is used for .odg and also for PDF. Consequently, if your .odt end up in Draw (and shown like PDFs), you have overwritten them with their PDF version some time in the past.

Recovering them if you have no backup is very tedious and manually intensive.

#5

Thanks for your comments.
Your suggestion of “damaged” files is possibly the cause as my computer crashed a month ago, but I was able to re-install most things from a saved disc.
I have just written a few words in Writer which was saved as a odt file and it reopened in Writer. So future Write documents should be OK.

#6

Just checked my Windows 10 laptop “Choose default apps by file type” and see that Open document drawing, presentation, spreadsheet, text are all only available to be opened in LibreOffice. Surely they should be available to be opened in there separate file types.
I am not a computer programmer so do not understand the reasons for doing things.

#7

Let’s say that LibreOffice is a single program with modules that utilise different parts of of the core program. Effectively, LibreOffice looks at the file and chooses which internal process will open it, see post #4 by ajlittoz

#8

Fine tuning is possible. You are at a place, where Microsoft tries to simplify stuff for users, and remember: They also hide extensions by default. So you are configuring something you are not supposed to see…
.
For any file-extension you can also right click a file with this extension and select “open with”. There you can even browse for not installed portable software and make this a permanent choice (MS will not give this as first choices…)

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