Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Agents want excerpts of a manuscript sent to them in the body of an email; however, I lose the formatting when I paste and copy ms. to email. How can I email a ms. or portion of one without losing formatting. I use gmail if that makes any difference. * After seeing the 2 replies I got, I realized I should have said that I did try converting manuscript to .pdf before copying and pasting it in the body of the email. Same poor result. I then went through the body and made format corrections. The excerpt I sent was only 15 pages, and that process took a very long time, so I can't imagine how many hours doing that with an entire manuscript would take!

Welcome to the forums.
To my knowledge there is no way to gurantee that the formatting of your document will transfer to the body of an e-mail, especially an online one like gmail.
This is due to inconsistencies in the coding used for formatting between what Writer uses and what Google (gmail) uses.
Since the formatting is being lost, the only option I can think of, based on the restrictions you have mentioned, is to paste the text, then go through it in the body of the e-mail and apply the appropriate formatting....hoping that all of the types of formatting you are using exist for use in gmail.

Normally I'd suggest attaching the .odt file to the e-mail and sending it like that, but you specified that it had to be in the body of the e-mail...thus making an attachment an irrelevant suggestion.

Attach your document )or a pdf export of the document) to the mail.

The advanced and complex formatting properties of an office suite are not compatible with a simple text editor of a webmail service.

I thank you for both of your replies. Sorry, I should have said in Post that I did try exporting it to .pdf, but the results were the same. I should also have mentioned that I did go through the body of the email and made changes. HOWEVER, that agent only wanted 15 pages. Even that took a very, very long time. Can't imagine doing the entire manuscript that way!

/File /Export to PDF should maintain all the formatting, and be un-editable.

The big problem, imo, is the fact that you stated that the text had to be the body of the message.
While I don't know what the character limit for the body of a message is, there is a limit, which is part of the reasoning behind allowing documents to be attached.
A document, like a manuscript, can easily exceed the character limit for the body of an e-mail message.

An email using HTML encoding ought preserve the formatting; being old-fashioned, I use non-html email applications and receive all my emails in plain text. A section of text pasted into an email ought at least preserve the line structure; I doubt that agents require more than that for assessment of a work.