Writer - Inherited Formatting - A ghost in the works

[thaiexodus]

EDIT ADDED BELOW ORIGINAL POST

I’m hoping, suspect, this is a trivial issue and one of the LW old pros will just take a spare moment and bail me out.

I had a document originally imported from MS Word. The formatting, specifically the next line indent, came along for the ride. I type and it continues in that paragraph, hit enter and I am at an indented new paragraph.
However, Libre Writer does not have any indent set. All format settings are out of the box, or download, untouched.
The rot sets in if I accidentally hit any key - macro, that has anything to do with basic text formatting. If I Edit - Undo, the indent goes away with the whatever the macro did.
I can also recover the ghost indent setting by selecting more than one paragraph with the indent, paste it at the end of where I left off when I hit the macro, and the indent will return. Only one paragraph and Writer ignores and the indent stays gone.

And of course I accidentally hit F12 a few dozen times each day, blowing off all following ghost indents and have to copy and paste trick it into giving me my indent back.+

And the problem. I don’t have one of two documents with the ghost indent. It’s closer to, roughly, 60,000 pages in several hundred documents.

Would somebody be so kind and suggest how I can open an ODT, blow off the ghost formatting and quickly and easily put back all the First Line indents?

Please edit your question to provide more information (don’t post a comment or worse a “solution”; modify your question so everything is in a single location).

** Is your document saved as .odt?* YES
** How is is formatted? Styles or direct formatting?* DIRECT
** You mention macros. What are they used for?* I DON’T use macros. The only ones present are those that came in, are native, in Writer.

When you hit Enter, Writer uses the same formatting as the present paragraph. Consequently, indents should be kept. I suspected as much

F12 will make your paragraph part of a numbered list. Reverting to ordinary paragraph must be made by cancelling it. Backspacing to eliminate the number is not sufficient as the paragraph becomes an unnumbered item within the list. This may be what you call ghost indent.
This appears to be the case, with the exception cancelling F12 may or may not let the text revert to the indent. This is completely random and leaves me to suspect other MS Word ‘ghosts’ are present.

[ajlittoz]

Please edit your question to provide more information (don’t post a comment or worse a “solution”; modify your question so everything is in a single location).

• Is your document saved as .odt?
• How is is formatted? Styles or direct formatting?
• You mention macros. What are they used for?

When you hit Enter, Writer uses the same formatting as the present paragraph. Consequently, indents should be kept.

F12 will make your paragraph part of a numbered list. Reverting to ordinary paragraph must be made by cancelling it. Backspacing to eliminate the number is not sufficient as the paragraph becomes an unnumbered item within the list. This may be what you call ghost indent.

For best analysis, attach a 1- or 2-page sample file.

[Zizi64]

@thaiexodus

I can also recover the ghost indent setting by selecting more than one paragraph with the indent, paste it at the end of where I left off when I hit the macro, and the indent will return. Only one paragraph and Writer ignores and the indent stays gone.

I suggest you to reformat whole document based on the Page Styles, Paragraph Styles, and Character Styles.

Of course the Writer application can handle the indents in the paragraphs. But it is the worst idea to format directly the paragraphs (manually or by macro).
Use the Styles. That is the most valuable feature of the LibreOffice.
(Delete ALL of the direct formatting properties before.)

[keme1]

@thaiexodus

Would somebody be so kind and suggest how I can open an ODT, blow off the ghost formatting and quickly and easily put back all the First Line indents?

Please note, while this is posted as a solution, it does introduce a few pitfalls. Proceed with due caution!

Elaborating on the comments from @ajlittoz and @Zizi64:
MS Word and Writer have inherent differences in the content formatting department. Superficially similar, as a new paragraph will inherit settings from the one it is “broken off” from. The important aspect is with styles, where Word does support a hybrid text/paragraph style and Writer has a more elaborate styles scheme. Translation between the two will inevitably generate hidden “formatting residue”, and the more you move back and forth between Word and Writer context, the worse it gets.

This means that there is no simple fix-it-all to the situation.

A rough starting point:
if you venture this route, be sure to keep an untouched copy of your documents
You can select all (Ctrl+A) and remove manual formatting (Ctrl+M). This will keep all applied styles, but remove formatting applied to content directly by format tools. Trouble is, typical Word document will have all formatting (like bold/italic/underline emphasis) applied manually rather than by style. Such emphasis will then be lost. Manual first-line indent will also be lost, but hopefully all your running text will have the text body or normal paragraph style applied, so you can just modify that style to apply desired indent & al…

Alas, this needs to be done separately for each of your documents.

If your headings are also manually formatted, major rework is upcoming. Heading style needs to be applied. Make sure you alter heading appearance by editing the style, not by manually formatting each heading. Also, typically, Word “reformatting macros” will apply manual formatting and is likely to undo applied styles. Better get rid of them if you are not sure that you need them or have intimate understanding of what they do and when to use them.

[ajlittoz]

In addition to @keme1’s elements, note that though hitting F12 is akin to direct formatting, Ctl+M will not remove their effect. Consequently, you may still have spurious unwanted indents corresponding to unnumbered list items.
Please attach a sample file as requested for an evaluation of the effort needed to “normalise” your documents.

[thaiexodus]

@keme1

Elaborating on the comments from @ajlittoz and @Zizi64:
MS Word and Writer have inherent differences in the content formatting department. Superficially similar, as a new paragraph will inherit settings from the one it is “broken off” from. The important aspect is with styles, where Word does support a hybrid text/paragraph style and Writer has a more elaborate styles scheme. Translation between the two will inevitably generate hidden “formatting residue”, and the more you move back and forth between Word and Writer context, the worse it gets.

This means that there is no simple fix-it-all to the situation.

While I am loathe to accept it, I fear that :“formatting residue” is highly likely. Many of my documents that were originally in MS Word went back and forth between Word and Open Office, sometimes several times, before I imported all into .ODT in Writer. I’ve been a victim of various entities enslaved to MS Office products for many years, sometimes working in Word, sometimes importing into a more functional program and format.

@Zizi64 Thanks for the styles suggestion. I definitely intend to move in that direction. I haven’t made such a move before now due to the import and export I have had to do and different programs I have to run. Thus nearly all formatting I use has been manual.
But now I have the option to discriminate. If it isn’t in .ODT or I can’t deliver the transcript or proofing or whatever in .ODT I won’t take the job…

[Villeroy]

Even Word has styles and Excel has cell styles similar to Calc. Nobody uses them due to pure ignorance and because the user interface does not suggest any such feature.

How to See All the Paragraph Styles Used in Your Word Document

[thaiexodus]

@Villeroy

Even Word has styles and Excel has cell styles similar to Calc. Nobody uses them due to pure ignorance and because the user interface does not suggest any such feature.

Thanks very much for the info and link. I would dryly note in that linked info the word “style” isn’t used at all until a person digs six levels deep and then only the obscure mention of “style pane width”.

As for ignorance, that is why this forum and others exists. Ignorance is inevitable, especially so when it comes to computers. Nobody is fully informed when it comes to high level programs. Microsoft is probably the chief offender as far as the number of people kept in the dark are concerned, which includes their own employees. Web searches will commonly find multiple info blurbs and posts.from MS themselves that supersede or contradict their own help desk, technicians and developers. The Windows “help” service is universally regarded as useless and very often misleading.

An outstanding example
January, 1986. Inside the IBM PC by Peter Norton. Buy the book, study it, use the floppy disk that came with it and make your own Norton Utilities 1.0. I did. It didn’t work. I wrote to various people in Peter Norton’s circles for help repeatedly.
Around 02:00 one morning I got a phone call. "Is this…? Then “Hi. This is Peter Norton. I understand you are having trouble with…”
Nearly two hours on the phone he walked me through his own program and discovered an ambiguous and potentially misleading paragraph in his book that he himself missed repeatedly as he talked me through the code and compiling.

When a person who is able to think in raw machine code and was a contributor for MASM has misses and lapses, don’t have high expectations from the help desks and files, let alone the average users.

(On a humours note, at one time I could write raw machine code, was an expert and contributor for Corel Draw, I knew Adobe pre press programs like the back of my hand including Dreamweaver. And now it took me five minutes to recall HTML code for a line break,)

[thaiexodus]

Addendum
@Villeroy I expected this. An older version of Word, checking the styles their way. Two of three documents checked are left panel identified only as Paragraph. No indent mentioned. Most likely the style tool only catches Styles made by Word in that version. Export then import back and Styles aren’t reliable.

AND, wanting to update Word, no can do. Must update the entire Office suite. Then not checking carefully, I downloaded the suite for Windows 10 which won’t touch Win 7. A dig through the archives found the Win 7 compatible version. Then conflicts arose. It reassigned all Open With…. commands embedded in the OS to the Office programs, with errors and conflicts.
And cake frosting to all that an error comes up telling me my Win 7 is Not Genuine Windows. One of the dozens of programs I have installed over the years had set some flag MS proprietary checking had misunderstood some setting.

I expected this. A half hour trying to get things back the way I had them then let it run overnight restoring the entire C: drive back-up I made prior to the Office install.