Created attachment 152083 [details]
Bertha-G1-TG-Sample.pdf: example pdf where many textboxes could be combined.

For working with publisher files in LibreOffice, the formatting is preserved much better when importing a PDF rather than a .PUB file. The main drawback, however, is that each line of a paragraph is imported as a separate text box. This makes any editing nearly impossible.

Currently you can choose multiple boxes, then right click and choose "Shapes > Combine" or "Shapes > Merge" but that turns them into a non-editable image / graphic box and loses the ability to edit the text. What is requested however is to combine the text boxes and keep it editable.

There are some OOo/AOO feature requests that ask for a button to merge multiple text boxes:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=59551
http://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=95387

Here is a workaround from the apache bug report above that uses a macro to combine the text boxes into one text box: https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/178518/get-selected-text-boxes-and-combine-into-one/?answer=178571#post-id-178571