Keeping things in place

[Windwood]

I've been writing a book. I'll save a manuscript at the end of the day and when I come back in the morning things have changed. Frames loose their formatting, text and frames, and photos get pushed all over the place. It looks like a first grader has been in there messing about. I had this issue in the first edition and just kept going back and manually fixing things. Very time consuming and frustrating. Seems to me that once things get saved, they should stay put.
It's a very large and complicated script and hard to even scroll from top to bottom quickly. Takes forever to save.
I had divided it into 10 different sections and edited each one separately and now that I'm combining everything it's even more of a horror story. Any ideas would be most appreciated.

[LastUnicorn]

Try switching from OpenOffice to LibreOffice and see if things are better there. There are several good reasons to make the switch, some of which are mentioned here: [Tutorial] Considering a Switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice? Some Useful Information

[RoryOF]

If a document of non-trivial size is not structured using Styles, it will give problems with almost any application. I suggest you read
Writer for students (several languages)

PDF at
http://openoffice-uni.org

for a good introduction and see how you might revise the document.

[Windwood]

Downloaded Libra but it removed all styles, formatting, etc. Major job to redo all that.

[JeJe]

Have you tried using a master document to 'combine' the parts?

[robleyd]

In what format are you saving your documents?

[Windwood]

.odt format

[RoryOF]

There should be no need (read: best not) to use a Master Document,

If your document has inserted page breaks to divide it into chapters, any rearrangement should be limited to individual chapters, and the only overflow from one chapter to another ought be different page numbering. If many or all chapters are rearranging, then there may be a problem with your method of layout.

[Hagar Delest]

Downloaded Libra but it removed all styles, formatting, etc. Major job to redo all that.

Rather strange since ODF is supported by both suites. It is the point of using a true standard like ODF.
Can you be more specific about the loss of formatting?

[RoryOF]

A two or three page sample file would be helpful, as that would inform us of any errors in formatting.

[Windwood]

No. I cannot be more specific other than to say that I copied from Apache and pasted to Libre. It was initially messed up pretty bad, but later after reopening it in Libre it was much better. Regardless, still having formatting issues with my frames and some positioning issues. Trying to copy a short section to post here so you can see but that is proving somewhat challenging at the moment. Will get that done.

[RoryOF]

Frequently it is not necessary to use frames. A sample file will help.

[RoryOF]

Also, a complex file - 1000 pages you say, using frames. will count as complex - may tale quite some time for the formatting to stabilise, perhaps several minutes.

[Windwood]

Not sure if this file is too big but a fairly good example of what I'm up to. rickhartigan.com/Mountain Lakes Demo.odt

[Hagar Delest]

No. I cannot be more specific other than to say that I copied from Apache and pasted to Libre.

Why not just open the file with LO? Copying and pasting may indeed leave things behind.

Note: once you have uploaded your file in the forum, use the Place inline button. Your link is wrongly formatted.

[Windwood]

Is the place button the one with the </>? If so, I did use that. Possibly file size is inappropriate. File is linked from my website. If not, I cannot find a "Place" button.

[Windwood]

Link is working on my end.

[keme]

Link is working on my end.

I do not know why. Perhaps you have some helpful browser. The PHPBB software autoparses, and expands the link so your website name appears as a subdirectory in the forum.openoffice.org site.

Edit your posting, and add a leading https:// to the link. This makes the forum software treat your domain as a domain, not a folder. It may also be a good thing to encode spaces differently.
Like so:
https://rickhartigan.com/Mountain%20Lakes%20Demo.odt

[Hagar Delest]

I just tried but the download fails.
Anyway, no need to provide 40MB of data. Just few pages will do. With some formatting of course so that we can see how it is rendered in AOO vs. LO.

[RoryOF]

The long download, as given by keme, worked for me. No time to look at it for 8 hours - meetings all day today (yuckj!

[JeJe]

The 40MB is just a few pages! Its because your pictures are massive - that's why its loading slowly. The first one, the waterfall is a 12.3MB 2832 x 4028 pixel image which ends up getting massively shrunk.

Is the book getting paper printed or just becoming an ebook?

Edit:

you can make the original image size smaller in terms of width and height and you can also, without noticable loss of quality, reduce the original image size by compressing it more than the current level of 98% quality (what IrfanView says it is anyway) which is hardly any. How far you can go depends on the end product.

[robleyd]

Perhaps [Tutorial] Some useful hints on using images might be worth reading.

[JeJe]

You can turn off showing the pictures like this:

Tools Menu / options/Openoffice writer/view untick Display graphics and objects

Assuming that itself doesn't change the positioning of them you can then work with the pictures not showing till you've sorted out any layout problems. The speed lag should vanish.

[Hagar Delest]

I managed to get the whole file.
Here is what I gt in LibreOffice:

demo.png (70.45 KiB) Viewed 966 times

It looks rather good.
But almost 62MB for 8 pages and 10 pictures, that's a significant issue. Optimize your pics first.
As shown in the screenshot, there is no custom style for paragraph but there are some applied styles (caption, footer, headings...).
Thus, styles are correctly rendered in LO.
There are paragraph with a heading paragraph style, leading to blank entries in the Navigator. You should change the style to the default paragraph style instead.

[erbsenzahl]

But almost 62MB for 8 pages and 10 pictures, that's a significant issue. Optimize your pics first.

It is possible to copy the (larger) images out of the .odt file (you may rename it to .zip at first), then to bulk decrease their space (around 40 %) and then to insert again in the .zip file (later on rename into .odt file).
XnView or XnViewMP did it in just one minute, to prepare the procedure I needed around 4 minutes.
In the end your sample file had 2.5 MB.

If printed: Often it is sufficient to have images (jpg with low compression) of around 200-500 kB per specimen for one entire A4 page.

[RoryOF]

Conventional printing wisdom is that an illustration need not have resolution greater than 180 dpi (dpi - dots per inch) for good quality, and 210 dpi for best quality. This is based on the ability of the eye to resolve fine detail at normal reading distance. So, if you, external to OpenOffice, reduce your pictures to such resolutions, and re-insert them into your file, that should reduce the size greatly and speed up opening and editing.

Two comments: turn on /View /Non printing characters to see some unnecessary characters (possibly inadvertent key presses), which you may remove. Also, rather than 14 pt type and Single line spacing, try 12 pt and proportional line spacing of 110 or 115%, play with such settings, perhaps even as low as 10.5 pt; I think you might be pleasantly surprised how much nicer your finished document looks. But it is your document, and you have the final aesthetic choices.

[Windwood]

Conventional printing wisdom is that an illustration need not have resolution greater than 180 dpi (dpi - dots per inch) for good quality, and 210 dpi for best quality. This is based on the ability of the eye to resolve fine detail at normal reading distance. So, if you, external to OpenOffice, reduce your pictures to such resolutions, and re-insert them into your file, that should reduce the size greatly and speed up opening and editing.

Two comments: turn on /View /Non printing characters to see some unnecessary characters (possibly inadvertent key presses), which you may remove. Also, rather than 14 pt type and Single line spacing, try 12 pt and proportional line spacing of 110 or 115%, play with such settings, perhaps even as low as 10.5 pt; I think you might be pleasantly surprised how much nicer your finished document looks. But it is your document, and you have the final aesthetic choices.

Took your advice on the line spacing to proportional. Good idea. Non printing characters show mostly carriage returns. Question: is it inappropriate to use enter key to create a spacing. If so, what is the alternative.

[RoryOF]

The best way to generate inter-paragraph spacing is to modify the paragraph style in use; in its definition select its Indents and Spacing tab and set Space Above paragraph or Space Below paragraph to non zero. Usually one needs to use only one of these, probably space below paragraph.

[JeJe]

Stylelistic suggestion - a consistent and a little bigger whitespace border around the pictures and frames might enhance the visual appearance.

[Hagar Delest]

That all said, it does not tells what was wrong between AOO and LO...