other software/formats?
Thanks, Virgil.
My documents are similar to yours. One last question
then I'll give you
guys some peace. :-) Would making a page style with
page size "letter"
and with a footer be considered LO specific? I don't
need anything more
intricate than that.
Thanks for the tip regarding Atlantis. I only have
Linux at home so will
probably stick with LO.
Thanks again. Your replies have helped a lot.
Regards,
Ryan
On 26/08/13 23:29, Virgil Arrington wrote:
My documents tend to be *really* basic in terms
of formatting.
Typically, they are either legal or academic
style papers. I'm a heavy
user of paragraph styles and won't work without
them.
I tend to do my entire document as an .odt and
then at the end convert
to .doc as necessary. I'd use the paragraph
styles, but I would avoid
LO specific methods.
Another option is a shareware word processor
called Atlantis. It's a
lightweight clone of pre 2007 Word (e.g., no
ribbon) with a $35.00
registration. I often use it when Word
compatibility is paramount. It
does nearly everything *exactly* like Word. I
honestly don't know why
MS hasn't sued them, it's that close. It
doesn't support tables, but
other than that, it will handle simple formats
very well and will
produce a result that Word should read fairly
well.
Virgil
From: Info/UX
Sent: Monday, August 26, 2013 5:38 PM
To: Tom Davies
Cc: Virgil Arrington ; users@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] LibreOffice
paragraph styles exported
to other software/formats?
Thanks, Tom, Virgil.
If I wanted to use different text body styles
throughout I would
probably have made new styles and called them
text body 1, 2, etc.
Luckily nothing like that is needed in this
case. But I have created my
simple template with basic paragraph and page
styles.
So, in trying to process the information in
both of your replies, I feel
I now have two options: (1) Keep with the MS
formats (.docx, but .doc if
possible) and format with minimal use of LO's
special features (even so,
I'd rather use styles than format everything
manually), (2) Start a
blank .odt and copy and paste my article
content and load the styles
from my template and save to doc later (and
maybe then to docx on a
windows machine).
Which method do you think would give the best
results? The priority is
for the finished pieces to look consistent in
MS Word... and also allow
other people to edit the .docs in Word with
minimal quirky things
going on.
Thanks for all this advice.
Regards,
Ryan
On 26/08/13 21:18, Tom Davies wrote:
Hi :)
If you can use MS Office to do some final
proof-reading then you are
unlikely to have any problems.
We have been assuming that is not possible
and that would make the
final outcome uncertain. Being able to
quickly scroll through before
sending it out into the world kinda
eliminates that uncertainty.
If you can keep all your 'originals' in Odt
format and then at the
end convert to Doc format then you should
find that there are no
surprises.
Virgil seems to be talking about a very
specific set of styles or
method of using styles. He is talking
about changing styles (such as
changing the font of "text body") on
different pages within the same
document. If you need to do that it might
be worth creating
duplicates of the styles and then modifying
the duplicates? I'm not
sure how to deal with that but Virgil has
probably found a
work-around if needed.
I would keep copies of
photos/images/art/logos near the original Odts
just in case you do run into problems. LO
does have an extremely
rare intermittent bug that is difficult to
pin down but seems to be
getting rarer and rarer as code clean-up
goes on. You know that you
can rename files from .Odt or .DocX to .Zip
and then double-click to
see the Xml coding inside along with
folders for various things such
as images. Sometimes it can be a neat way
to fix problems but it's a
bit risky. The Xml tags and such are very
different in the 2 formats
so just renaming .Odt to .DocX might create
fairly serious problems.
Stick with the "Save As ...". the Doc
format doesn't open in that
way and doesn't hold images in an image
format which is another
reason i suggest keeping a copy of images
nearby.
Also i have sometimes found that mysterious
things happen during the
course of a Word document. So to save
myself a lot of time i tend to
start with a fresh new Odt and then use
Ctrl Shift v
to paste in "unformatted text" and then
apply styles (and maybe
modfied the styles after to watch the mod
ripple through the
document). Occasionally i have wanted to
"just do something quickly"
and then been frustrated by some weird bit
of insane MS formatting
that just keeps throwing up problems until
i relent and do the "start
again from scratch" approach which has then
typically taken just a
few minutes even if the problem seemed
intractable.
Regards from
Tom :)
------------------------------**
------------------------------**------------
*From:* Info/UX <infoux@gmx.com>
*To:* Virgil Arrington <cuyfalls@hotmail.com>
*Cc:* users@global.libreoffice.org
*Sent:* Monday, 26 August 2013, 19:23
*Subject:* Re: [libreoffice-users]
LibreOffice paragraph styles
exported to other software/formats?
Thanks, Virgil.
I can probably alter any lists when I work
in an MS environment at the
final stage of formatting.
Regarding page formatting — I'm wondering
if I use slightly more
advanced features of LibreOffice to get my
results whether it would
cause more problems when working in Word. I
am trying to keep the
process relatively simple. The articles
only need to have consistent
fonts and spacing and perhaps one page
break for the bibliographies. I
have starting created a LibreOffice
template with customised paragraph
styles and some changes to the page style.
I was planning to apply this
to the .docs. As long as 90% or so of my
formatting would transfer to
Word, I don't mind making some manual
adjustments at that stage.
Thanks,
Ryan
On 26/08/13 13:00, Virgil Arrington wrote:
In my experience, most paragraph
styles tend to translate well to
MS-Word formats. However, I've had
problems with the alignment of
automatic numbering and/or bullets. LO
and MSW seem to align them
differently.
One bigger difference, however, is the
way the two formats handle page
formatting. LO uses page styles to
change formatting from one page to
another, whereas Word does not. It
uses section breaks to make such
page formatting changes, and I've
found discrepancies in translating
page formatting between the two.
Virgil
From: Info/UX
Sent: Sunday, August 25, 2013 1:38 PM
To: users@global.libreoffice.org <mailto:users@global.**
libreoffice.org <users@global.libreoffice.org>>
Subject: [libreoffice-users]
LibreOffice paragraph styles exported to
other software/formats?
Hello,
Apologies if this is a basic question.
I've been given some
documents to
format according to certain style
guidelines. The files are mostly
.docx
and .doc and must be sent off in this
format. I work only with
LibreOffice. My questions is, if I
format the articles using paragraph
and page styles rather than just
directly changing the format in the
body of the document, will the
formatting be maintained when the
documents are opened in MS Office? I
am not concerned with small
discrepancies that can be tweaked
later on, rather whether this method
of formatting generally transfers
well. Again, sorry if it's a silly
question.
Many thanks.
Ryan