Forum
Sign In | Register
Topics related to editing or writing documents & Web sites

Documentation

OOo Writer Frame captions do not convert well to Word

One major area of incompatibility with OOo Writer and MS Word is converting a Writer frame (usually enclosing a picture and a caption) to Word. What happens is that the caption’s formatting may have its indentation altered.

Such a OOo Writer frame with an enclosed caption appears as below:

OOo Writer frame with enclosed caption

After converted by OOo Writer to the MS Word 2003 DOC format, it appears in MS Word as the following:

bbb

Obviously, the figure caption’s formatting has been altered after the conversion.

A workaround for this would be to use a two-row table in OOO Writer–placing the graphic (picture, in OOo Writer terminology) in the first row and the figure caption in the second row. If a different number of graphics or a different arrangement is desired, then modify the table dimensions appropriately.

OOo Writer to MS Word conversion incompatibilities

There are a number of incompatibilities between Writer and Word that show up after one is converted to the other. Most conversions to/from Writer and Word are seemingly flawless, whereas some conversions are horribly botched.

The “current” OOoAuthors Migration Guide was originally written for version 1 of OOo Writer and MS Word 2003 and, therefore, is now terribly out-of-date. Because no writer or other editor at OOo is apparently addressing this issue of incompatibilities, I will take upon myself the gathering of items of incompatibilities between Writer and Word.

As any inconsistencies between Writer and Word are noticed, they will be listed in this blog under the category–Migration Guide. These items will then be considered later when thoroughly rewriting the OOoAuthors Migration Guide.

OOoAuthors Draw Guide–Ch4 (Changing Object Attributes) is edited and ready for publishing.

(1) Copyedited. (2) As with Chapter 3, an index was appended to the back so that the indexing could be checked. There were two upper/lowercase errors. (3) Numerous character style changes made. (4) Some minor technical errors.

This chapter should be ready to publish.

As in Chapter 3, an alphabetical chapter index was appended to the back of this chapter. This allows a checking of the index entries before the omnibus book index is constructed. There were two indexing errors that were detected at this editing level. When a book is made from the chapter subdocuments, the current front stuff isn’t used anyway. So adding an index does no harm and only helps the overall technical editing process for whenever a book is published.

OOoAuthors Draw Guide–Chapter 3 (Objects and Object Points) is essentially copyedited.

(1) Copyedited.

(2) Footnotes need to be repaired. They initially were all set to #1 and still are. Is this a bug with my version or not???

(3) Some of the subgraphics were not properly aligned in some figures. These should be rechecked. One figure has two #1 subgraphics instead of #1 and #2.

(4) Several minor technical errors fixed. Some disagreements with the GUI names were corrected.