Hi…
LibreOffice writer switches from Arial to Liberation Serif on its own. I think the easiest thing to do is to demonstrate it on a video, which is here on YouTube.
Anyone knows why this happens? It’s LibreOffice 7.4.1.2 running on Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon.
Please upload an ODF type sample file here.
.
…Maybe the “Next paragraph style” property of the applied paragrah style is set to an another paragraph style.
Though it is quite difficult to read window details because of your dark theme, there are two “flaws” in your workflow: you configured for tabbed UI and you save your document .docx instead of native .odt.
The first choice makes me very suspicious about your formatting because tabbed UI encourages direct formatting, the way Word promotes it for lack of adequate high-level concepts. Another hint about that is the spacing between your title/heading and text done with an empty paragraph. The standard Writer way is to use styles.
The second fact will cause loss of data through the repetitive conversions to/from alien format. The effect is cumulative across eiting sessions and ends up in unrecoverable damage to your document.
The “default paragraph style” was set to Liberation Serif, and that appears to be the cause so far.
I didn’t realize that LibreOffice works like that. In word, you just set the font for one paragraph and the rest of the paragraphs become like that. Working with “high-level” formatting as ajlittoz says isn’t what I’m used to. I was always under the impression that Libre was just like Word but I guess that’s a pretty dumb impression, ha.
Either way, thanks. Your post was what gave me the idea to look in there.
Also, I didn’t know using “docx” files is dangerous. I thought it was one of LibreOffice’s features?
Saving as .docx is a “convenience service”. DOCX and ODF format have not the same specifications. There is an important common intersection between them regarding basic formatting features but, as soon as the requested feature(s) become more elaborate, you meet divergence. Therefore, formatting directives must be translated into another “dialect”. Unfortunately there is no one-to-one correspondence between the primitives. This means the description for the formatting/layout/feature must be approximated. When you reopen the document, this approximation group is again interpreted and you don’t end up with the initial description. The more editing sessions you have, the bigger the differences between what you expect and what you get.
If you really need (must?) send a .docx, convert your document only once at end of the full creation/tuning/optimisation process. There is still approximation but only once. If your recipient returns corrections, don’t work on the returned .docx to avoid corruption. Instead, identify the changes (“Track Changes” feature can help) and add them manually into your .odt original.
In addition, I remind you that M$ Word claims it can read and create .odt (though Micro$oft, as usual, has implemented a non-conforming ODF variant!). So, you can put the blame on your recipients by sending them your .odt and let them assume the divergences.
I believe that what you see is a bug in your old version of LibreOffice.