I’ve converted a PDF of a book to Word format - the pdf has 2 pages side by side which the conversion has accurately reproduced but I want to have just a single page to make it easier to edit.
My problme is I don’t understand the page layout - I don’t think it’s 2 columns, neither is it a table.
I have searched for answers - but everything seems to be about “How to VIEW 2 pages” and that’s not the issue.
Le diner de cons.docx (340.3 KB)
Isn’t document material copyrighted? Be careful about intellectual property!
That said, your attached document is .docx, i.e. M$ Word proprietary format. You’re here on a site dedicated to LibreOffice and any given advice is valid, stable and reliable only under .odt format.
Presently your .docx document is DOCX-flavoured beyond repair.
Most of these defaults result from the choice of .docx format. The document is polluted beyond repair.
Your best option is to restart from fresh by pasting unformatted text you can extract from PDF viewers and restyling the document.
PS: when asking here always mention OS name, LO version (and save format).
Thanks for your comments. I want to reformat the document for personal use, not to copy or distribute. I used Finereader for the conversion, so any formatting problems arise from the conversion - I don’t think that’s anything to do with a docx file.
Abby Finereader can split two side by side pages into two single pages but it should be done in the set up phase before scanning I think
It is remarkable how LibreOffice at times is limited in mass operations. One would expect to, for example, be able to select the whole text then apply a single page style to the entire selection. Searching page styles and delete them is not possible. That does not even work with character styles, but fortunately it is possible for paragraph styles.
That would be the best solution - except I can’t find it, despite a search of the menu options, the user guide and asking on the Finereader website!
It has to do: you open a foreign format file in Writer which must then convert this foreign format into something it understands and handles. Since DOCX is a proprietary format, its specification is partially publicly available. Don’t expect perfect translation. Anyway many ODF concepts are not present in Word and this causes many problems, like the one page style per page syndrome or the systematic direct formatting because of the lack of character styles. Note that the reverse is true: several concepts present in Word have no equivalent in Writer.
For best and quick results, open files with their original application. If you want to use Writer, follow Writer rules. If the document was scanned by yourself, use an OCR app to retrieve text, at least unformatted.
After much trial and error, I think I’ve found an answer to my own question, i.e. how the pages were formatted.
Apart from a few odd pages, the formatting is simply done with 2 columns - changing this to 1 column gives the result I was looking for.
What I didn’t properly understand what that I first looked at columns under “Format page” - which only showed 1 column. But the alternative “Format columns” showed 2 columns (!) which I changed to 1.
Thanks to everybody who commented.
Your page styles are effectively single column, but a section has been added in every page. This section is 2-column with a gap in between.
I suggest you open the Navigator pane (on the right side or as an independent window) so that you have an idea of what is exactly in your file.
Remark: I’m using Writer vocabulary for Writer features as if your document was an .odt. But it is a .docx and since I left Word nearly 20 years ago, I don’t remember how I should name the features. In particular a Writer section is not the same “object” as a Word section.
To avoid any difficulty, you should always edit a document with the application used to create it. Founding principles are usually quite different, if not conflicting. Otherwise, it is safer to restart from unformatted text. Even with best compatibility algorithms, there is a high risk to downgrade to very basic approxilate features.