[Solved, kinda] Writer crashes while saving large document

[Hagar Delest]

When you save a master document, you don't save a big document, you save mere links to sub documents. So there should not be any problem saving such a file.

[Vagabond]

Hi! Sorry to resuscitate an old thread, but this is very bothersome. More than two years after this thread has been opened, the problem is still there, not fixed. I'm using a master document with about 10 sub-documents, containing a total of around 600 pictures. These pictures are linked, not embedded. I used a master document because it's supposed to be easier to work with if you have a lot of contents. And it is. Only, it's useless if you can't save it! I'm using a computer with 4 GB of RAM. As soon as OOo reaches the limits of my available RAM, it crashes. Is there a way to show this thread to developers? Because I think they should fix it, a serious alternative to Microsoft Office shouldn't have that kind of bug.

Otherwise, has anybody found other ways to work around this? Other open source software compatible with ODT format that doesn't crash while trying to load too many pictures at once?

[Vagabond]

Hey, I just want to up this and say a BIG THANK YOU to the developers. I've just downloaded version 3.4.0, and it doesn't crash anymore! Yaay! Thanks a lot!

[kingfisher]

Have you searched the issues site? I've seen a similar issue relating to the spreadsheet application.

Wrote the above while you were posting. I'm glad it has been fixed.

[mikegreen12]

I had similar problems to others and found a solution which resolved my problem. I wrote a lengthy document with hundreds of images that I copied from the web. All the images were embedded links. After I passed some unknown threshold, OpenOffice crashed often and was very sluggish. For an unknown reason, when I saved my odt document as a doc document, I was able to work on the document in OpenOffice without it crashing.

I believe that sometime when I do a "copy image" that i get a copy of the image while other times I get an embedded link. I speculated that the embedded links were the source of my problem. To test this theory, instead of copying an image to the document which created an embedded link, I did a "save image as" and stored the image in a nearby folder. I then clicked: insert > Picture > From File and put the png or jpg image into the document. Fortunately, most of these images were very small averaging about 20K. One by one I removed the embedded links and replaced them with physical images.

All of a sudden after removing some of the embedded links, the responsiveness of OpenOffice returned. I believe that the problem was that OpenOffice had to fetch each image using the embedded link each time it displayed the image. Also moving the embedded image around the page was very difficult as was doing any editing of the text.

Here are the positive consequences of my solution:
1. I am no longer in danger of losing my image because of a broken embedded link. That image is stored on my PC and within the OpenOffice document.
2. I can easily move my png or jpg image around the page.
3. Responsiveness of OpenOffice has returned.
4. Crashes have virtually stopped.

The only downside is the size of my document increased from about 296K to 2318K. However, I added many new images and the size is still acceptable.

[Hagar Delest]

You may also link the pics but locally so that the links point to a folder next to your file.
Indeed, AOO has always had problems retrieving pics from the web.