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

[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.