I have posted this rant in the Writing forums too several months ago. It appears that when I had been using Open Office Writer for many years to write and style some of my upcoming books, some sentences within paragraph styles are not able to take the proper font-size chaning. I always use the default Times New Roman at 12 pt to edit my writings, but I was horrified to see that when I change the point size in the style settings of the various styles, some sentences will ignore the font size change; they will take other types of formatting (such as changing of the font), but they will not take the changing of the point size. I can sure highlight and change the troublemakers manually, but that’s obviously the wrong way to do it, and I am not about to revisit hundreds of pages. There is also another way: I can highlight the sentences that are refusing to get formatted, then I can clear all formatting and strip away the italicization too, and then reassign the style and re-edit the text by italicizing the appropriate words again… Again, this is begging for weeks if not months of extra editing, and I am not about to do it… My two final options are: 1) Just suck it up and keep my text at 12 pt… 2) Select all text in the entire document independent of styles, and manually change the point size to smaller point size, bypassing the assigned styles… My lesson for the future is that when I Copy and Paste new text, I need to make sure that it is highlighted and stripped away from all formatting… If anyone has suggestion on how to avoid this issue, let me know. Thanks.
I doubt anyone here uses OpenOffice Writer for design purposes — it’s a writing tool. I have a copy on my Macintosh, but I rarely open it since I also have a copy of MS Office, which I mostly use to open Word files that clients send to me. Any work I have that involves styling text takes place in a layout application, where there are better and more robust layout options.
Today I lost the whole day trying to format page numbers. With the page numbering manual on one side, and asking AI prompts on the other side, at the end I still didn’ learn anything. I figured, since I write, I may try to skip a page layout software because I haven’t used one in many years… But I couldn’t figure out how to do non-numbered pages between the numbered pages, and I am not trying any more.