Hi
The GS Guide Ch4 has been uploaded to here;
http://www.odfauthors.org/libreoffice/english/getting-started/draft-lo-4.2/chapter-4-getting-started-with-writer/view
Unfortunately, with this copy I had a lot of trouble with LO crashing and file corruption. There are almost no recorded changes prior to about page 21 and masses of deleted pages after the document ends. The chapter is good to go in spite of this.
Regards
Johns
Do you have any idea why they crashed? Did you try a copy (Ctrl-A and Ctrl-C)-and-paste of the entire chapter file unto a clean, new ODT file from the most current template?
Gary
Hi Gary
No, no idea why it crashed. I was just editing happily and it disappeared off screen, with no announcement, on one of the occasions, another occasion had the look of a 'standard' crash with warnings and recovery options. It was from one of these, after it took a good ten minutes to recover a document and something like five to six minutes to delete a single character that I did a copy/paste into a new clean template. I did this a couple of times all told during the work on the chapter.
Copy/paste doesn't transfer over the edits, that is, the deleted or changed text, with or without 'Record Changes- Show' being enabled when copying is done. Hence the document not displaying changes made before pasting.
Regards
JohnS
Hi John,
The only thing I can see here is a typo at the bottom of page 17 - "unrecognised". Other than that all
good.
Sad to say I think I reviewed the previous version of this guide which includes the same typo :-[ . Maybe something to note down for the next version?
Cheers
A recurring problem I occasionally encountered is having some (or all) of the Figure graphics disappearing in some (corrupted?) Writer chapter files for one reason or another--sometimes, even before any editing/rewriting was done to them. So, I would make multiple files in the process of editing docs in order to enable returning to an intermediate edited copy with its graphics still intact--thus not losing all that editing effort.
Gary
Thanks Tim
The error has been rectified and the file replaced.
Regards
JohnS
Hi Gary
Happily for me, disappearing graphics have not been a problem for a long time now.
With respect to the Writer guides, Milos has done some work and 'cleaned' them using some software routines. Unfortunately there appears to be some random changes made to some of the custom styles we use (not the coloured backgrounds to styles that are in the 'cleaned' files, but others). I have adopted the routine for Writer of copying and pasting content from the 'clean' files into a new v3_4 template in order to reset all the styles that have the same names, to those in the template.
I am going to keep multiple copies for the time being. My earlier problem was with v4.2.0.3 and now we're into v4.2.0.4 I'm hoping it will be trouble free. Time will tell.
Regards
JohnS
One thing I noticed about disappearing graphics was that some figure graphics were attached "as characters"--a method that is used for inserting "inline" graphics along with the text. IOW, on a line of text, as a character. Figure graphics should be attached differently.
Whenever those figure graphics were "missing," they were still contained within the ODT file; however, they were invisible. I would detect them by hunting around with a cursor for their outlines--and then either delete them or cut-and-paste them to reattach them where they should have been--inside their figures. If I was unsure where the one I found was supposed to be (which figure), I would simply paste them somewhere at the end of the chapter file for storage, to be inserted afterward.
Gary
I anchor all figure graphics "as character" in their own paragraph. If
anyone does it differently in a user guide file, and I notice, I
change it. This has worked more reliably for years in our docs than
other methods. I don't have the time or energy to explain what the
problems are when doing it differently.
--Jean
Myself, I prefer inserting graphics (images and pictures, according to LO/OO) in figures (illustrations, according to LO/OO) without inserting the figures inside a needless paragraph. I am sure that most writers/editors of the user guides are aware of the hierarchy of the factory-default paragraph styles; however, I will expound on this topic just a bit...
All the default paragraph styles (except the root style) inherit from the root style named Default Style (previously named Default until fairly recently). There is a (second-level) Caption style, which itself has four default (third-level) styles that inherit from it--Drawing, Illustration, Table, and Text; all of those four are meant, by default, to be used for adding captions to drawings, etc. The Caption style could also be used by itself if only one type of captioning is used (figures with no tables or vice versa), but the Caption style can be further used to set up its children default styles with a common formatting characteristic, such as a redefined default typeface (font) for all of the four third-level captioning styles, which can be formatted differently from those in Default Style--the granddaddy, first-level style.
So, there is no need to create any special custom caption paragraph styles or create other paragraph styles to insert figures into paragraphs with those custom paragraph styles--unless one wants to. Staying with the factory defaults, a figure could employ the default Illustration paragraph style for just the figures' captions--but not for the entire figure (illustration) construction. Likewise, the default Table (caption) paragraph style can be used for captioning tables, but not for the table's elements.
My writing/editing preference is not employing any custom styles unless there is a real need for creating any. For making a figure with the factory defaults, first insert an image graphic and change whatever formatting desired (via the Picture dialog box) and, if a caption is used (often, a recommended procedure), then select the graphic and use the Caption command (right-click menu) to invoke the Insert Caption dialog box, which by default sets the caption to use the Illustration (caption) paragraph style, sets up its figure (illustration) numbering, etc.
Inserting an image by itself--without a caption--sets up the image automatically with the default Graphics frame style; adding a caption afterward then changes the captioned figure automatically with the Frame frame style, which encloses the image (Graphics frame style) and a caption (Illustration paragraph style).
Anyway, that's my dos centavos...
Gary
Myself, I prefer inserting graphics (pictures, according to LO/OO) in figures (illustrations, according to LO/OO) without inserting the graphic inside a needless paragraph. I am sure that most writers/editors of the user guides are aware of the hierarchy of the factory-default paragraph styles; however, I will expound on this topic just a bit...
All the default paragraph styles (except the root style) inherit from the root style named Default Style (previously named Default until fairly recently). There is a (second-level) Caption style, which itself has four default (third-level) styles that inherit from it--Drawing, Illustration, Table, and Text; all of those four are meant, by default, to be used for adding captions to drawings, etc. The Caption style could also be used by itself if only one type of captioning is used (figures with no tables or vice versa), but the Caption style can be further used to set up its children default styles with a common formatting characteristic, such as a redefined default typeface (font) for all of the four third-level captioning styles, which can be formatted differently from those in Default Style--the granddaddy, first-level style.
So, there is no need to create any special custom caption paragraph styles or other styles to insert figures into paragraphs with custom paragraph styles--unless one wants to. Staying with the factory defaults, a figure could employ the default Illustration paragraph style for just the figures' captions--but not for the entire figure (illustration) construction. Likewise, the default Table (caption) paragraph style can be used for captioning tables, but not for the table's elements.
My writing/editing preference is not employing any custom styles unless there is a real need for creating any. For making a figure with the factory defaults, first insert an image graphic and change whatever formatting desired (via the Picture dialog box) and, if a caption is used (often, a recommended procedure), then select the graphic and use the Caption command (right-click menu) to invoke the Insert Caption dialog box, which by default sets the caption to use the Illustration (caption) paragraph style, sets up its figure (illustration) numbering, etc.
Anyway, that's my dos centavos...
Gary
Hi Milos
The problems I came across, and I went no further than checking these, lie with the numbering and the list styles.
For example, if you care to look at, say Chapter 9 picked at random, and select the OOoNum 123 Start style, you will see that on the 'Outline and Numbering' tab, 'Numbering' has been set incorrectly to 'None'. On the 'Indents & Spacing' tab, you will see the 'Before text:' and 'First line:' values have been incorrectly set to zero. This applies to the whole family of OOoNum styles and to the OOoList family of styles too.
As I said, I have checked no other styles as I then adopted my copy/paste routine to get on with the work.
I hope you find this information useful and good luck with what you're doing.
Regards
JohnS
Hi John,
I see, this relates to the Writer Guide. It was introduced by me - but I do not feel very guilty :), because it looks like an LO bug.
I did two things with the guide files. First, I manually replaced direct formatting by an appropriate style. Then, I removed the unnecessary tagging by the cleanup script.
The problem was introduced in the first step. To distinguish the text with style from the directly formatted text, I first created a template with styles with colored background. Then, for each file, I loaded the template. However, I probably did not check the "Numbering" button in the Load Dialog. Is I have found out today, in this case LO breaks the list-like paragraph styles. I would expect that they were not changed at all.
Would I check the "Numbering" button, everything would be OK.
There does not seem to be a simple way to correct the corrupt files (one has to load the template "correctly" and then check and correct each list in each file). So, I will clean the WG files from scratch again. It will take me a few days. I will download the WG files from https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications#Getting_Started_with_LibreOffice again, is that OK?
Thank you for pointing to the problem. If you think that this is really a bug and not feature, I will submit it to bugzilla
Milos
Dňa 2014-02-04 17:50, John Smith wrote / napísal(a):
Hi 
Gary if you think you have pin-pointed one of the mysterious but
increasingly rare "vanishing graphics" bugs then please do add that
information to one of the bug-reports about this.
A couple of years ago this mailing-list did seem to help eradicate one
of the other rare "vanishing graphics" bugs by trouble-shooting down
one of the most 'common' occurrences of the bug(s) at that time.
Since then the problem has been so rare that further trouble-shooting
has been impractical.
Thanks and regards from
Tom