I am using LibreOffice to create my stories and never had any real issues with it, except for this time. I had this happen one other time and Lazeez walked me through it and it was a simple process. Would anyone explain to me how to fix it? I generally save my files in MS Word format or in Open Document (*.odt). What ever I am doing isn't obviously working
I am using LibreOffice to create my stories and never had any real issues with it, except for this time. I had this happen one other time and Lazeez walked me through it and it was a simple process. Would anyone explain to me how to fix it? I generally save my files in MS Word format or in Open Document (*.odt). What ever I am doing isn't obviously working
Hard to explain how to fix it, when you haven't said what It is.
I use LO (.odt) but I never posted a straight ODT, I always exported to .html for posting.
Sorry, I am getting some of my text randomly appearing in bold format when posted. I have only had this happen one other time, and after I corrected it, I never had this iddes appear until my recent posting. Fonts that I use are Times Roman or Liberation Serif.
Make sure that you don't have stray formatting codes in your ODT file.
On LO, under the view menu, turn on formatting marks.
I had a problem a few times with extra blank lines when I posted a file.
I discovered that even though I didn't see the extra blank line it when editing the document in LO, there was a stray newline in the file. I found this because I was exporting to HTML and posting the HTML, I opened the HTML file in my browser and found the extra blank line there.
I am getting some of my text randomly appearing in bold format
From the SOL guidelines:
Asterisks ( * ) and underscores ( _ ) are almost reserved characters. Try not to use them in your writing unless you're using them as formatting markers. All asterisks will be converted to < strong> tags and all underscores will be converted to < em> tags.
Plain text formatting and SOL tags are respected in all formats. For example if you submit a .docx file containing *some text* (surrounded with asterisks), it will come out bold on the site. If you use any of the formatting tags described in the SOL tags sections they will also apply.
Well to see if my fix works. The "corrected files" are in the queue.
No, it did not work. I received the file and it had multiple instances of bold text. I fixed it myself.
I'll lay out the reason for this problem and the solution.
This happens for both Word and LibreOffice (usually) when two people collaborate on documents and somebody marks the text as bold for one reason or another. The same issue happens for italics text.
So, let's say the author sends the file to his/her editor. The editor marks a bunch of text in bold as a way to tell the author something. Then the author selects the bolded text and turns it not bold. In MS Word and LibreOffice, this works great. The text stops being bold.
However, when submitted, the text comes out bold or italics depending on the case.
That's because these idiotic word processors do something completely nonsensical when turning off the bolding or italics. They keep the bold or italics tags and they style them as non-bold.
For example, when the text is exported to html, I receive text like so:
< strong style="font-weight:normal">Invisibly bolded text< /strong>. This text looks not bold when viewed in the word processor and when exported as html and viewed in the browser, leading the author to believe there should be no problem.
However, when my conversion scripts handle this, they don't see the 'font-weight: normal' bit, they only see the < strong> bit. The script results in { strong } tag, which then gets reconverted to < strong> tag.
If the author tells me that the text is showing bold or italics where not desired, then I look over the text visually and see what's going on and I fix it on my end.
To fix it on your end there are multiple methods that work depending on your text.
1 - If your text does not have any italics or bold text that you put there (like chapter 1 that got reposted multiple times), then simply select all the text in LibreOffice or Word, and copy it and use the paste text functionality in the submission system to paste your text instead of attaching the .odt file. That is 100% effective in fighting this issue.
2 - Same no-formatting-needed text can be done by exporting the .odt file into a plain text .txt file and attaching that.
3 - If your text requires bold or italics. Then the solution is more involved.
Here are the steps:
a - Select all the text in your document and copy it.
b - Switch to a text editor like notepad (or vi for unix users).
c - Create a new document and paste your text. Since a pure text editor does not handle formatting, the plain text version of the problematic text is pasted into the new document. Save the new document as .txt file.
d - Since you need formatting, then open this .txt file in LibreOffice (or Word) and format your text as you desire.
e - save the file as .odt or .docx.
Now this word processing document doesn't have any hidden formatting and can be submitted safely.
Although, if you make a mistake and format more text as bold or italics and you revert your action with something other than undo, then you may be reintroducing the problem into the text again.