Openoffice writer

Can anyone advice on the best format to be saving my drafts in, when using OOW?

Thanks in advance.

 

For drafts, use their native format.

 

Thanks, Steerpike.

I think I may have misled you by saying 'drafts'.

I suppose what I was asking is what would a publisher / agent want them in?

 

Oh. Save them in .doc or .docx unless the publisher says they take open formats. If they take .rtf and are using Word it still may not look right. Check individual publisher guidelines.

 

Before my computer died a year or so ago, I'd managed to find and install a wonderful widget for OOW, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was called or when I found it.

I think there was an option that allowed the user to assign F-keys to a certain functions, but for me the best feature was that you could have the widget open in a side panel, which displayed a word count. If you double clicked a word, the dictionary and thesaurus would be triggered and the info for the word would be displayed in the same panel.

Any help in hunting down this tool would be greatly appreciated.

 

I need help with formatting.

How do I set it up so that I can safely remove an indent from the first line only, following a line-break, without it also removing the automatically inserted indent for each new 'enter/return' ?

For instance:

Duis odio urna, euismod vel viverra sed, auctor a ex. Vestibulum eget porttitor ligula. Aliquam volutpat dapibus turpis vitae tempus. Vivamus sit amet dolor eu augue commodo vulputate.
.......Praesent hendrerit eros at placerat consequat. Fusce hendrerit sollicitudin leo, fringilla pulvinar est feugiat nec. Vivamus dapibus semper elit, sit amet feugiat libero pharetra sit amet. Praesent aliquam et massa ut porttitor. Nunc mollis erat lorem.
.......Donec lobortis viverra tincidunt. Aliquam pellentesque, libero vel pulvinar vestibulum, sapien ex lobortis est, sit amet cursus ligula augue vitae tellus. Nulla viverra, nulla eget .......porta fermentum, ligula orci cursus purus, nec condimentum nisl nisl non sem.

Quisque nec fermentum massa. Proin dapibus dapibus urna finibus maximus. Phasellus sed sagittis libero. Sed sem lectus, accumsan euismod feugiat consectetur, auctor eu dui. Vestibulum sit amet purus velit.
.......Praesent nisi turpis, rhoncus at luctus ut, sodales non risus. Fusce sit amet lectus ut risus rutrum vestibulum quis vel risus. Vivamus et faucibus eros, id luctus arcu. Ut cursus ac purus quis placerat. Proin ornare dolor viverra tincidunt porta. Donec elementum mattis neque sed ultricies. Nunc blandit auctor tempor. Sed et dictum metus. Quisque maximus tristique tempus. Proin scelerisque massa ac dui aliquet aliquam. Aliquam eget risus leo.

 

I had a pop-up in Writer telling me an update for my dictionary extension was available. I downloaded it and ran it, but when I click 'add' it wants me to choose something on my PC.

What the hell am I supposed to be choosing??

 

Some little history: Originally, the free productivity suite we speak of here was named OpenOffice.org [sic] (that was the official name with correct capitalization, and the ".org" was part of the name). Part of it were made at Oracle (but released under a public open-source license), and the webpage was hosted by Oracle, too.

In 2011, Oracle wanted to get out of the project (they had nothing to do with anymore beside owning a few trademarks and being kept as originator of some code), and donated the whole thing to the Apache foundation. Apache however wanted to change the licensing (I don't know exactly what way). This was protested by the majority of the developers working on it. The developers left, took the code with them, as they were allowed to do, and started LibreOffice. Apache continued the work under the changed license terms, and renamed it to Apache OpenOffice.

Both claim to be official continuator of the original project, though most of the developers of LibreOffice (which are the majority of the developers of the original OpenOffice.org) claim that Apache OpenOffice is a fork.

That said, Apache had, and probably still has, some problems maintaining quality of the project, and keeping enough developers working on their product.

The better choice for us users, in terms of quality and future development outlook, is LibreOffice. Most Linux distribution keep LibreOffice in their depositories. Ironically, also the Oracle Linux 6 distribution has LibreOffice.

There are some other forks, for instance NeoOffice for the Mac, which is made commercially (costs money), which uses codes from both projects (as much as it can be done under the licenses which apply).

 

I always use a non-propriety format. At present, RTF (Rich Text Format). Every word processor under the sun on any platform you choose (Mac, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) will load/save this format. If you want to future/past-proof your work, it's the best way to go.

EDIT: After skimming through the rest of the thread, Microsoft DOC (there was once a WordPerfect DOC format as well) is the best way to go for submissions. From what I've heard, OO and its derivatives (LibreOffice for one) seem to handle MS's comments and track-changes well enough so you can do a back-n-forth with a story editor without any trouble.

 

That's what I said and everyone advised against it!

 

But if they're drafts for your own personal use, it shouldn't be an issue. I've revised my original reply to this thread to include submission format.

 

RTF is a proprietary Microsoft format. They publish the specs so it usually translates well, but there are differences in RTF formats between applications and you can't be 100% sure the file will open properly in every program. I've seen RTF files screw up going from, say, LSB to Word.

 

Perhaps not so much since 2008, however, when Microsoft abandoned the format. Since then, OO and others have pretty much nailed interchangeability.

What is this LSB you refer to, BTW? I've never heard of a word processor or file format by that name.

 

Liquid Story Binder. The software isn't under development anymore, and hasn't been for three or four years.

I sometimes get .rtf files from clients that don't look right, but I don't know what they used to create them. But they're always openable and the data is all there.

 

I usually do it by defining a paragraph style - typically "No indent" - and setting in the Organizer tab of "Edit Paragraph Styles" for the following paragraph to be "indent" or "Body Text", or whatever I name it at the time.

 

@Michael Pless - The best solution I've been able to find it set the document to first line indented (to 1.20). And then after the first 'Enter' click at the start of the line you want to remove the indent from, go to format >> paragraphs and set 'first line' to 0:00.

It's important to remember that before doing this make sure you finish the paragraph and press Enter (to lock in the indent for the next line) before gong back and removing the indent, otherwise the indents will be removed for every line.

Clear as mud, innit?

So the start of a chapter would be:

Chapter 1

.........This is the start of the chapter, but the indent shouldn't be there. However, you much finsih wring this paragraph before removing the indent. Otherwise the indent will also be removed from all subsequent new lines too.
.........Once you've started a new paragraph, you can click back on the first line and remove it, and it won't remove the indent from the start of the new paragraph, which should be there, because you've locked it in place by pressing Enter.

 

Correct. However, it IS human readable (you can open it as plain text with a text editor, and get the text out of there), though it contains a LOT of command structures to do the formatting that you have to weed out to get the pure text.

It's better than Word's own .DOC/.DOCX, though. In particular for file exchange (.DOC/.DOCX is binary, not human readable, and contains elements specific to the original system the file was created on that may or may not transfer over). While .RTF may not transfer fully between different applications, you typically get something to work with. With Word, a mess-up can happen even between different Word versions. The worst transfer I have ever seen occurred between a (not fully updated) older Word (I think 2000 vintage or some such) and a fully updated Word 2010. The original file in question did, however, appear completely fine, or only with minor formatting hiccups, in LibreOffice, Pages, and an old Word '97 that we still had installed somewhere. But it had fairly bad formatting issues on the 2000 version, and came back completely messed up.

 

I give up!!

When I've asked about formats, the general consensus seemed to be: Save drafts in the WP default file type, but convert to .doc when submitting.

And now here we have someone saying .doc is no good. Arrggh!

 

To expand just a tad, it is (was) a program similar in concept to Scrivener, in that it was more of an organizational platform than just a flat word processor. I used it when I was still on a PC and liked it quite a bit. It was a little looser in structure than Scrivener. Scrivener just feels more self-contained, tighter.

 

That is one solution.

 

I'm so sorry... you seem to have little or no understanding of what is meant by a "paragraph style." If you want to fix your formatting issues, that's a very effective way. It's up to you if you want to find out or not. I won't return here because I've answered your question.

 

Many markets want .doc or .docx, and if they don't specify that's a safe format to send in since it is widely used as a standard.

 

Perhaps if you were better at communicating things I may have tried your solution, but your post was garbled and very poorly explained. And what's more, from what little I could gather from your solution, you haven't even understood what it is I'm trying to achieve.

 

Sadly, no longer. Mac's in-house wordprocessor Pages no longer recognises RTF. I know, I know ...WHY? And only a couple of years ago, readers of MacFormat magazine were told that saving all text files in RTF was a way to future-proof your files.

I keep hoping they'll wake up and restore RTF in the next version. I have NO IDEA why they removed it. I have come VERY close to dumping Pages as a result, and went so far as to test-drive a few other processors, including LibreOffice.

I rejected LibreOffice because when I opened a file created in Pages or TextEdit in LibreOffice, it changed the file so I could no longer open the original file (even a version brought, untouched, from a backup flash drive) in the original programme that created it. I didn't like that 'takeover' at all, so I dumped LibreOffice without testing it any further. However, it looked decent otherwise.

I really really liked ClarisWorks, AppleWorks and the Pages '08 and '09. But this new one is a pain in the arse, frankly. They've also hidden quite a few things I used to use frequently, and what used to be one-click actions now take several clicks to accomplish. I keep hoping they'll listen to the zillions of complaints they've had from users and restore some of these functions. But hey.

I know if a processor came along that was as user-friendly, as versatile, and as good as the old Pages was, I'd switch in a minute.