Tag: Microsoft Word 2007

LibreOffice has an undo limitation that isn’t working for me

Lynn

I have spent a lot of time preparing myself to switch permanently to LibreOffice before I move to a new computer and no longer have access to my old Microsoft Office 2007 install.

Well, today, I came across the first limitation that actually might be a problem for me.

I edit as I write. In fact, I sometimes change a sentence, paragraph, or word multiple times before I settle on what I like, and sometimes I end up right back where I started. I very often use ctrl+z to do that. Very often. And I can end up hitting ctrl+z a great many times in a row to get back to the version I want.

A great many times.

It so happens that a few times I’ve run into this limitation with LibreOffice Writer and managed to just ignore it, but not today.

Oh, no. Today I had to reload my book from the last saved version of the file, which I was lucky enough to have not saved in the last five minutes (never thought I’d say that!) so that I could recover what I’d written the first time through. I also had to remember a few lines that I had changed but wanted to keep while I scrolled to my place in the document so I could change them back.

LibreOffice Writer seems to have a low limit for this kind of behavior. (100 is the limit, in case you’re wondering. I know, I know. 100 is a lot. I did say “a great many times” and I admit that this probably isn’t smart behavior on my part. :D Still, I do it, and I’ll have to actively remember not to do it if I keep using Writer.)

There is an advanced configuration setting in LibreOffice that will let me increase the number of undos, but I hate having to change the default configuration. I always worry that there was a reason it was set as it was, and that changing it might introduce bugs or other issues that will degrade the performance of whatever program I’m using. The article I got the info from about the configuration option basically says I’m right to be worried.

Grr.

Now I have to decide if I want to try to change my behavior, or accept that me and LibreOffice might not be meant for each other. If not, then I’ll be going back to Word 2007 until my computer dies on me, and then resubscribing to Office 365 so I can use the new versions of Word and Excel once I’m on a new computer and can’t access Word and Excel 2007 anymore.

This is really not how I thought I’d end up back in the arms of Microsoft Office. I honestly thought it would come down to the style sets.

I’d already discovered that you can’t undo style edits in LibreOffice and that didn’t make me happy. Word doesn’t have that limitation, and I know it because I tend to tweak styles and then change my mind and undo them. I learned that lesson in Writer the hard way. I had to manually reset some styles I changed after playing around while not being aware of this limitation. Oops.

Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer?

Lynn

I’ve been telling myself for a while I needed to switch to LibreOffice Writer. I canceled my Office 365 subscription because I hated Word 2016 just that much. I spent three years as a subscriber and wasted good money on it and never could get used to it enough to actually use it. I used the OneDrive space and OneNote 2016. That was it.

I didn’t hate everything about it, not by far, but there was enough.

  • Lack of ClearType support. My computer really needs that—or maybe my eyes. Either way, the type in Word 2016 looks horrible and since I spend a lot of time staring at the type, that doesn’t work for me.
  • Styles and design tabs were reorganized into something that felt a lot less intuitive.
  • They made Excel green. I mean, I don’t hate green in principle, but I really hate that green. It doesn’t help that I love the blue of Excel 2007. (I am not so enamored with the gray of LibreOffice Calc, but hell, at least it isn’t green.)

There’s a more complete list of all the reasons I hate Word 2016, but suffice to say, I could not get used to it and never ended up writing more than half of one book in it.

HOWEVER.

Yeah. All caps.

I am finding it really difficult to switch to LibreOffice from Word 2007 and Excel 2007.

Calc is rough to look at every day compared to Excel 2007 while Writer has some annoying little glitches that make me want to open my documents in Word 2007 and just write.

  1. Writer jumps around sometimes, such as when I hide whitespace.
  2. Writer can’t find and replace ^P paragraph marks. That matters to me because I sometimes mistakenly put a space as the first letter of a paragraph and a quick search and replace before I do my final spell check takes care of that in Word.
  3. Lots of people say Word is unstable with large documents, but I haven’t found that to be true for me. I have a complete series file for each of my series. One is 570,462 words long. Opens just fine in Word, and searching the file is fast and easy.
  4. Calc loses my row height when I use the format painter to copy a format to a different cell. I’m really not sure what that’s about, but I use the format painter all the time, and ugh. I like my row heights the way they are and don’t want them changed, and they shouldn’t, because I’m copying a format from a row that’s already the height I like.
  5. I just really miss my routine. I like Word 2007 and Excel 2007.

My reasons for switching make sense, and I’ve already formatted a couple of paperbacks in LibreOffice Writer and YES, it is so much easier than Word once you figure out how the hell to use the page styles. You do have better control over the orphans and widows and hyphenation options. It really cut down on how much time it took to manually adjust my page spreads so things looked good.

But for the actual day to day writing? I miss Word 2007.

And as for Calc versus Excel, don’t even ask. I miss Excel 2007 like it’s a phantom arm. Calc can do everything I need it to do, and I still miss Excel 2007. That’s the one that’s killing me.

Sigh.

 

Microsoft Word and Embedded Fonts; Open Type Is a Problem

Lynn

These things matter because I need embedded fonts to generate the right kind of PDF file for CreateSpace. I never noticed a problem with this before, but apparently the font I’m using is an Open Type font and Word won’t embed that font.

Now, this really surprised me when I researched the issue today, because the book I’ve been preparing is the third book in a series and is the third book to use that same font. Why I didn’t notice, or why it didn’t seem to matter, the last two times is beyond me, but this time, it came up as a problem in CreateSpace’s Interior Reviewer.

What I discovered is that Microsoft Word won’t or can’t embed Open Type fonts even if you have license permissions for those fonts to be embedded. I checked, and sure enough, I have the right permissions. Word just won’t embed Open Type fonts.

The solution was ditching the Word “save to PDF” option, and a search for a decent PDF printer that would embed those fonts for me. I installed several, including doPDF, CutePDF, and finally, PDF Creator (their website seems to be a bit broken, but this is the one that worked for me in the end). I couldn’t get any of them to print to the right sized paper for my book (5×8).

Turns out I had to create a new “form” for my printers.

That was tricky to find, since I’d never heard of this before. I found it under my control panel, printers, and when I clicked one of my printers, it was something I needed to do in the “Print server properties.” I created a new 5×8 form, with measurements of, you guessed it, 5×8 inches, and then when I “printed” my Word docx to the PDF Creator printer, it saved just fine!

A lot of work just to get some fonts embedded in a PDF file but it was worth it to know I’ve done it right.* I’m left wondering, though, how in the world did I get my last two books in this series through CreateSpace?

Also, although I ended up using PDF Creator to successfully create my PDF file, I have to wonder if the others would have worked just fine once I had created the new 5×8 form. I didn’t discover that I needed to do that until I found a FAQ on the PDFforge.org website, Word documents with custom page size are converted in default size:

By default, PDFCreator only knows the paper formats that are created when it is installed. If a custom format is defined in Word, PDFCreator does not recognize it and thus Word will use the default page size.

To create new paper formats, they have to be created under Print Management->Server settings. There you can create name and dimensions of the format. Aftwards, you can use it in Word.

And there was the tricky bit. I had no idea what “Print Management->Server settings” meant. But once I figured it all out and did it, my file came out great.

I uploaded it earlier this evening, and there weren’t any apparent issues according to CreateSpace. Yay!

*What I really need to do is learn Adobe InDesign, but for what I do, it’s just not worth it at the moment.