Font size does not survive pdf

[skeeve]

I've been trying to print a calc document with a 15 pt. font.
IME printing non-text, non-pdf often does not go well,
so I am trying to make a pdf first.
I received it as an Excel file with a blinding 11 pt. font.
Using the toolbar to change the font size on the screen works.
With export to pdf or print to pdf, the 11 pt. font come back.
Grrr.
Changing it to an ods file first did not help.

How do I fix this?

My guess is that the display and the convertors
get their font sizes from different places.
My searching has suggested that I should look at
Styles and Formatting under Format.
My Format has no Styles and Formatting.
I do have a top-level Styles button,
but once I get there,
I have no idea what to do and
do not know whether it will help.

[keme]

Which toolbar did you use?
If you use the zoom slider in the lower right corner of the window, it does not really change formatting. It's akin to a magnifying glass. When you print that, you need a real magnifying glass to make it look as big.

To enlarge content so that it also looks larger on paper, you need to change the "point size" of the content formatting. This is usually done by selecting cells where content needs to be enlarged, then change the size in the dropdown on the Formatting toolbar. A better way is to make a cell style with a larger size setting, and apply that style to said cells. If you want everything larger, you can also modify the Default cell style. (Using styles may seem like an unnecessary extra step. You will benefit from it when you want to make another change, or revert back to original size, or at any time when you want to control formatting and want a unified look to your output.)

This change often also requires resizing of cells. (If content is too large to fit within available display area, number cells will show as ##### and text cells will have a small red arrowhead in the corner.)

It is also possible that your problems spawned from the Excel-Calc transition. If styles or direct formatting was applied in the spreadsheet before, then there will be autogenerated styles to cater for all the cases where Excel and Calc do things differently. That may amount to a lot (I have seen spreadsheets imported from Excel with more than 900 autogenerated cell styles).

[jrkrideau]

My Format has no Styles and Formatting.

Technically all Calc documents, (well all AOO & LO documents) have at least one style, the Default Style.

Open the Styles Window (F11) and at the bottom of the window you will see the Styles currently being displayed. Change to Applied Styles to see what Styles are being used.

If it is just the Default Style, right click on it and select Modify. Go to the Font Tab and change the Font size to whatever you want. If there are multiple Styles you may have to change each one individual if changing the Default Style does not cascade down. It may or may not. If there are a lot of Styles labelled Content1, Content2 and so on, these are crap styles generated by Excel. In my experience it is best to delete them and use a small number of Calc styles.

If you have manual formatting the best idea is to select the entire spreadsheet sheet and go Format > Default Formatting and then reapply the formatting using Styles. This will sound cumbersome at first but a) it should give you the results you want and b) you can use this spreadsheet as the basis of a template if you expect to be doing similar layouts on a regular basis

I'd suggest having a look at the relevant chapters about working with Styles available at OpenOffice User Guides. They are written for OpenOffice 3.3 but nothing in the are of Styles has changed in AOO or LO since then.

[keme]

If the "Styles and formatting" entry is missing from the Format menu and you have no recollection of ever modifying the Calc menus, something is definitely wrong. Sorry I missed that on my first reading.

Does this happen also when you start Calc with an empty sheet (without opening a file)? If opening an empty file gives you the "Styles and Formatting" back, the altered menu setting comes from the file you opened. When the entry is missing from the menu, you may still be able to toggle the display of the Styles and Formatting toolbox by pressing function key F11.

Resetting the profile may help.
Note the info in the first post of that thread, about slightly different paths for LibreOffice etc.

[skeeve]

Ack. I seem to have wandered into the wrong forum.
I'm using LibreOffice.
This computer has never had Open Office on it.

[Zizi64]

My Format has no Styles and Formatting.

The User Interface of the newer LibreOffice versions are a littlebit(?) different:
There is a new main menu, named Style.

The last item is the "Manage styles F11"

[skeeve]

My apologies for not getting back to this sooner.
I just haven't had the combination of time and mood
to try to climb a learning curve of unknown height.

I made some attempt to work the menus,
but so far I have just had to live with 11 pt.
I think that I will try again before the end of the month.

I suspect that some of my GUI problems arise
from me just not thinking like GUI authors .
E.g., oh yeah, right-click to get a menu.
That thing is under WHAT? How many levels deep?
Not so much LO, but in other contexts:
That icon is a WHAT?
LO uses words. YAY.