My OpenOffice Writer documents have developed a rather worrying bug when loading from my USB stick, so I'm posting here to ask if anyone else is experiencing similar. When I load up my WiP, whole chunks of the text are in italics. When I loaded up my latest chapter just now, the whole document was in italics, and all instances of two punctuation marks ('...' and ' - ') were showing as this symbol: � This sudden lack of stability is very worrying. How long before it renders EVERY punctuation mark as a random symbol?
do you have a sample document that you could provide so someone could take a look at it? That sounds like an encoding issue. Probably your document is encoded as utf8 and Oo is opening it as ascii. It also sounds like a virus, but it's hard to tell. What are you saving your documents as?
I'm saving them as .rtf I don't want to post a sample, as they're all chapters from my WiP. Strange thing is, the problem only started about three days ago. Can you explain how I ensure compatibility with encoding?
I posted this question on the Apache forum and was told I should only be saving files in .odt, and never directly to a USB (as I have been doing). The poster doesn't go on to explain why, but it's worth a try.
I don't know why the medium you're saving it to would cause the issue. I do know I'd prefer to save my documents as .odt, because that's the "native" format for LO. At the completion of my work, if I wished, I'd then "save as..." to another format. This may be a better way for you to go, unless there's a clear need for rtf during the writing/editing process. I also just tried exporting part of my work from my writing software and opening it in LO: all was good. In the past I've had problems with rtf, going into LO (from Liquid Story Binder) and I was informed that this is because LO rtf is not standard, which again, sounds strange, but the results I was getting were consistent in LO and not being shown in WordPad, for example. Given I have never experienced any issues opening rtf in LO before, I tend to think there was some issue in LSB.
I've had problems with .rtf from LSB as well. Apparently, .rtf is not a standard format, and LSB seemed to have more problems than other .rtf files.
Yes, I only just discovered the .rtf is not a standard. Anyway, I now save directly to my hard drive, and in .odt, and this seems to have fixed the strange italics thing and odd symbols on load up. I back-up now by zipping up all my chapters and emailing them to myself.
Yes, I was surprised to hear there were flavors of RTF. Importing into LO saw a jumble of thin black lines a few centimetres high. ^A then clear formatting got me readable text.
