Back when "save" used to mean something

[rolanni]

Who can walk me through a procedure for insuring that Open Office 3.0 will actually SAVE the changes I make my manuscript?

Yesterday, I spent 20 minutes of my life reformatting a manuscript OO3 had whimsically decided to make single-spaced. And, yes, it was 20 minutes because, though the text is double-spaced, each chapter heading is single spaced, so we're not just talking a simple select-all-line-spacing-double. However, I made the changes, swearing the entire time, SAVED THE FILE and got on with writing the next chapter, in its own file.

This morning, having edited the chapter I wrote yesterday, I opened the master file, discovering to what delight you may imagine, that, yep, the whole damn' thing is single spaced again.

I note that OO3 wants me to Save Everything in whatever-the-heck its native format is. This is not an option as the manuscript will eventually, please ghod, go to someone who wishes it to be in .rtf format. Double-spaced. With the chapter headings single-spaced. And one-inch margins all around. No matter what Open Office 3.0 thinks is cool.

ARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Simple solution: use paragraph styles. (Applying formatting to the document as a whole is a mug's game -- it's probably being overridden by whatever the Default para style thinks is correct. And, oh yeah, one of the items in Tools->Options->Load/Save allows you to change the default file format OOo saves things in. But why mess with that when you can use "Save As ..." when you're ready to generate a final submission draft?

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

But why mess with that when you can use "Save As ..." when you're ready to generate a final submission draft?

Because when I "save as" at the bitter end the submission draft will be scrod and I'll have to fix it by hand then?

I did find the toggle to save as .rtf. Small victories.

[elaine-brennan.livejournal.com]

I suspect the problem lies with the formatting in the master file, not the formatting in the chapter. If the formatting in the master file defaults to single space, then that's going to affect everything else.

Try opening the master file, setting its default spacing to double space, save, and close.

Then try re-opening the chapter you were working on.

If that doesn't work, I'd be happy to take a look at the files to see if I can figure out what's going on.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

That's a kind offer, but I'm pretty sure that what's going on is that I've Simply Forgotten how to do Perfectly Obvious Things (like how to set the page margins so that they are forever and ever amen 1-inch all around), because my head is full of book.

I really know better than to upgrade my word processor in the middle of a book.

[masgramondou.livejournal.com]

I'm not a user of OO3 but the earlier versions e.g. 2.4 don't have this problem. I just checked.

However it is possible that I'm changing the spacing in a different way to you. The way I do it is to press F11 to bring up the style list, then right click on the style for paragraphs (First line Indent) and select modify, then go to spacing and change it to Double.

If you do this and also verify that the spacing for the headers is single then you should not have a problem int he future. These changes do seem to be remembered in the RTFing in oo 2.4 at least

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Nope, you're right; 2.4 behaved itself, and we got along fine. Unfortunately, I need to download 3.0 in order to get a bit of needed functionality for something else (when did my life get so complicated?) and so I broke the Cardinal Rule, to wit: Do not upgrade your word processor until the Book has been sent to the editor.

[kalimeg.livejournal.com]

My favorite way to ensure a draft is to use "save as ...[new name]" and specify .doc as the type. That way you can leave your work open and check the new document for glitches before you shut the first one and possibly lose all that work.

[laurajunderwood.livejournal.com]

I've been hesitant to use OpenOffice 3 for this very reason.

However, I have found AbiWord most cooperative, and readily available for free in Linux and Microsloth flavors...

Of course, it tries to save as AbiWord format, but it readily accepts the command to save in rtf and never rearranges anything...

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

I'm having similar problems, and a friend referenced this post.

One way to work in OO and still save rtf properly is to use AbiWord as the go-between. Install AbiWord, get the plug-in that allows it to open OpenOffice doc types, and then resave them in rtf using AbiWord, which doesn't have the same problems preserving spacing and emphasis in rtf.

Headers work better if you add them after you've opened it in AbiWord, however, and I can't figure out yet how to get it to save the first page without a header (and preserve it in rtf).