[Solved] The characters in my text will not remain separate

[Antipater]

Hello, I have a laptop that relies on Windows for much of its mundane duties, and today I opened some Open Office Writer 4.1.1 files from it. They had been perfectly fine, but now they are unreadable.

All the lines of text seemed to have been drawn by some invisible force to the left-hand-side of the screen, the privacy of each individual letter having been utterly compromised so that each character appears superimposed over every other in the line to form some hieroglyphic amalgam.

Strangely, there seems only one mode by which to relieve them of their compacted state, and that is to view the Print Layout version of the document. And although this does not yet render the document how I would wish it to appear, it does make it legible again, thank god. There is some hope then, I glean, that the information itself hasn't been corrupted, just the presentation of it.

The reason this has happened, I strongly suspect is a direct consequence of my own tampering, I confess. I had, previous to this event opened my Task Manager, and terminated a number of background programs that I surmised had caused my computer to run extremely slowly. I did not know what function 90% of those programs performed, but rather than spending my day investigating the subject, I resorted to the much quicker technique of just ending anything that didn't seem important to me - which is a dangerous strategy since I am an ignoramus, but still preferable to the time-consuming alternative of learning. The good news, is that its speed has since improved significantly, but the bad news remains as described above. I assume this is a natural consequence arising from my meddling, though I could be wrong, either way I'm damned if I can rectify it.

One and a half hours have passed since I began trying to fix this. I would be extremely grateful if someone with relevant knowledge could offer me some counsel.

I thank you.

[robleyd]

Unrelated to Apache OpenOffice, but if you only terminated the background processes, rather than setting them not to start, a simple reboot will get you back to your previous state. Then you can see if the Writer display problem still exists.

And you have probably realised by now that it can be counter productive to mess with things you don't understand

[John_Ha]

Can you upload a small document file (eg .odt) showing the problem so that it can be analysed. Use the Upload attachment tab below where you type (128 kB max) or use a file share site for a larger file. IT would also be helpful if you could post a screenshot of the problem - make sure the Writer window is the active window (click in it with the mouse) and press Alt + PrtScrn to copy the image to the clipboard. Save it as a PNG file and upload it.

[Antipater]

Well, rather embarrassingly, David's proposed reboot did the trick.

Thank you David, I am exceedingly obliged to you. Though I do disagree with you about the messing with things, it is very often by that process that we come understand. Counter-productivity was the original problem. At least I now know something about how to solve it: by switching off background processes: as well as one of the undesirable effects of including the Open Office processes in that cull.

And I shall now make it policy to apply a reboot as a first-base attempt at solving any future technical issue of a similar nature.

I thank you again David.

[John_Ha]

And I shall now make it policy to apply a reboot as a first-base attempt at solving any future technical issue of a similar nature.

That is always a good idea. Remember the haiku:

Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that.