Bug 38652 - Export to .DOC alters important formatting
Summary: Export to .DOC alters important formatting
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
3.3.3 release
Hardware: x86 (IA32) All
: medium normal
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-06-24 13:53 UTC by Tom Balaban
Modified: 2016-12-24 18:13 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
ZIP witj DOC, ODT and PDF versions (171.44 KB, application/zip)
2011-06-24 13:53 UTC, Tom Balaban
Details

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Description Tom Balaban 2011-06-24 13:53:03 UTC
Created attachment 48386 [details]
ZIP witj DOC, ODT and PDF versions

I created a hierarchical document in the ODT format then I saved it as DOC format for colleagues who need that format. All subsidiary un-numbered paragraphs are open as left justified in the DOC format. In ODT they open as originally designed.
Comment 1 Jeffrey 2011-06-27 09:05:39 UTC
I am not entirely sure about the nature of this problem. Tom, although you mention that you created the hierarchical document in LO, it seems that the organization is incorrect. For example, points 3, and 5 should be indented after points 2 and 4 because they address the subtitles of "Sanctioning Entities" and "Sponsorship" respectively. It seems like there are similar problems like this throughout the document.

It seems that Word/.doc handles the documents better: there is a proper hierarchy to the points: numbers, then letters, etc. On the other hand, LO/.odt seems to jumble the paragraphs together, which makes it hard to read, (see under 1. Event). It also seems to be unable to differentiate the big topics from the sub-topics. For example, Events and Key Personnel are clearly equal levels of topics, yet Key Personnel is listed under Events as point 13. There is no hierarchy either. 1. Event is followed by another 1.

The only problem that makes it hard to read in Word is that the non-numbered paragraphs are indeed left justified, and the font is not homogeneous. Otherwise, it seems that the presentation in Word is much better than in LibreOffice.

Tom, can you provide some more details on this bug? For example why there is a hanging "1" at the end of the .odt file, or how Word can re-arrange the hierarchy properly from LO?

Otherwise, yes, I can confirm on LO 3.4 on OpenSuse KDE that Word/.doc has left justified points, while LO does not.
Comment 2 Tom Balaban 2011-06-27 10:04:58 UTC
Thanks for your comments but after reading them a couple of times I'm not sure that you and I are seeing the same thing when opening the file in LO. Have you opened the PDF which represents how the document appears in LO on my Win XP machine? E.G., "Sanctioning Entities" is sub-point "B" not "2" and "Sponsorship" is sub-point "C" not "4". There is not point "13." anywhere in my copy. To me that is even more scary. Please do open the PDF to see how it looks to me in ODT. Thanks.

I do not own a copy of Word. I do have MS Word Viewer but my bigger concern is that saving a satisfactorily formatted ODT document as DOC does not reopen with the same formatting it had when saved. 

This document was created completely in LO and opens as I expect to in LO when using the ODT file. I'm going to try and copy into a pure text document, then copy/paste it into a new ODT document, reformat it and see what happens.

One of the main reasons I through Word in the trash 7-8 years ago was because it handled hierarchical documents to poorly. OO and now LO have been a joy to work with. At the end of the day, I will submitted the PDF so I can live with this but it is disturbing that we are not seeing the same formatting from the same ODT file.

Many thanks for your review.
Comment 3 Jeffrey 2011-06-27 19:00:34 UTC
Sorry Tom, you are right. I was looking at the .odt file through ark, without having extracted it. Now that I have extracted it, it looks entirely like the PDF version, which is correct (proper hierarchy and indentation). So I guess that yes, this problem is reproducible on Linux as well.

It is very bizarre but can you check whether if you open the .odt file with ark the formatting is messed up?
Comment 4 Tom Balaban 2011-06-27 19:56:13 UTC
Hi Jeffery,

Using a LiveCD of Ubuntu 11.04, I was able to open the ODT document from within the ZIP archive using U 11.04 archive manager. The document looks exactly as I expect it to look. No obvious hierarchical errors.
Comment 5 Björn Michaelsen 2011-12-23 12:26:54 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 6 Tom Balaban 2011-12-24 09:12:26 UTC
Uinging LODev 3.5.0 Beta2 - This is bug still exisists. Same error as originally reported persists.
Comment 7 retired 2013-09-01 12:14:36 UTC
Still valid with LO 4.2 on OS X 10.8.4:

Version: 4.2.0.0.alpha0+
Build ID: 9fed8a5e4a4c45d6a08260e9480ca6b43254b120
TinderBox: MacOSX-X86_64@43, Branch:master, Time: 2013-08-29_07:14:27

Steps to reproduce:

1. open odt file contained in example zip
2. save to doc format
3. open doc file with LO or Word results in a different looking file than the original odt file.
Comment 8 QA Administrators 2015-04-01 14:40:54 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 9 Tom Balaban 2015-04-01 16:25:30 UTC
This error has not been fixed based on trying the test documents in LO 4.4.1 on my Win 8.1 box.
Comment 10 tommy27 2016-04-16 07:27:06 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 11 Tom Balaban 2016-04-16 18:21:16 UTC
This bug continues in version 5.0.5.2. The ODT files opens correctly. When I save is as a .doc, close LibreOffice than reopen the freshly saved .doc, text that should be indented under a given numbered paragraph is flush left.
Comment 12 Luke 2016-12-21 05:29:31 UTC
Verified that indentation issue was fixed in Version: 5.4.0.0.alpha0+
Build ID: d538d3d84172a74dfe97d59a6d3daf9a45459cab

When saved as .doc, the document looks good in both Writer and Word. Don't know when this was fixed, so marking as WORKSFORME.