Re: [libreoffice-users] Unwanted Text Boxes all over the document

Thanks for the suggestion Robert.  I can just set the borders to blank and that disappears them BUT
I expect the boxes still exist and may complicate future cut and paste operations.  There is no
"delete" function when you highlight the border so I can't directly delete the boxes.  All I can do
is highlight the entire box and delete everything and I could do that and then paste back the
original text.  I had thought of that but the work involved suggests that a better way is probably
available, I just don't know it!

I suspected that your comment about heavily edited documents going bad and that's why I mentioned
it.  Same reason I don't use templates because they are not guaranteed to be compatible when
changing word processors.  In this case some HTML formatting may have been picked up in paste
operations too; I really don't know. 

Thanks for the reply.

John
======
On Wed, 2025-05-21 at 15:57 -0400, Robert Funnell wrote:
> John -
>
> I have nothing very valuable to contribute. Hopefully someone else will. 
> I can say that over the years I've had large heavily edited documents go 
> bad, apparently getting confused, and exhibiting strange behaviour.
>
> Does it work to remove an individual box by copying its contents, 
> deleting the box, and pasting the contents back into the document?
>
> - Robert
>
>
> On 2025 May 21 12:09:29, John Iliffe wrote:
> > I'm not sure what I did or what is misconfigured but I am unable to back it out.
> >
> > I entered a fairly long change in an existing document in plain text and then formatted it
> > afterwards.  At one point it seemed logical to emphasize what I was saying by putting the text
> > in a
> > text box which I have done many times before in previous versions of LO.  This time I was unable
> > to
> > get the text box to stay while I pasted the text so I Googled how and found that I had to hit a
> > character before I placed the cursor in the box.  So I hit an 'X' and the box stayed but I was
> > unable to paste into it.  Finally ended up typing everything inside.  I set the border to right
> > shadow and everything seemed as expected.
> >
> > BUT:
> >
> > There are many (dozens) of text boxes now spread though the document and I don't know how to get
> > rid
> > of them.  The preference seems to be for bulleted lists, of which there are many, to have each
> > list
> > item boxed but some paragraphs have been boxed too, sort of randomly.
> >
> > Some boxes are supposed to be there and were in the original that I was editing but most are not
> > required at all.  Edit|Undo doesn't get rid of them and now I have saved the document so as not
> > to
> > lose the updates so I can't try that again.
> >
> > The problem here is that I am updating a chapter of a book and I could pull it in from the
> > previous
> > edition but then I would have to find and retype all the changes and there is no reference for
> > that.
> > The chapter is 37 pages long and contains embedded graphics so I have to be careful what I
> > change.
> > In the end I would still need to insert the text box.
> >
> > To add insult to injury I'm on a deadline to get the next edition out.
> >
> > Has anyone any idea what might have happened?  Better yet how can I unbox all the previously
> > existing  text without losing the text in the boxes?  It is possible that while typing I
> > accidentally hit a control key but if so I don't know which.
> >
> > Info:   LO 24.8.6.2 (X86_64)
> >          Fedora 41
> > Document is in .odt format but has been edited/converted many times in other word processors
> > starting with Word Perfect 5!
> >
> > Any suggestions very much appreciated!
> >
> > John
> > ======


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