[Solved] Why has my document turned horizontal?

[Phil Birch]

For the second time recently, a document has turned into landscape mode by itself with only a paragraph on each page and the text going vertically. I have tried turning it back to vertical format, but the problem of one paragraph per page remains and the writing's still vertical. Hopefully an image of my problem is attached here. I have copied all the text into notepad and copied it back into Writer, but with 27000 words, its a big job re formatting the headings and chapters. Why does it happen, how can I prevent it and how can i undo it when it does?

While writing the same document strange symbols like chinese letters and question marks inside a black diamond appear where dialog is supposed to be. It's a big job changing it all and sometimes it all comes back.

[RusselB]

Welcome to the Forums.
Please attach/upload a copy of your actual file, rather than a screenshot.
Actual files contain a lot of information that is lost via a screenshot.

[John_Ha]

See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files for a description of differences and for why you should always work in, and save Writer files as .odt, Calc files as .ods, Impress files as .odp etc.

.rtf files are truly awful.

[RoryOF]

You will find this document be informative on using Styles in Writer:
Writer for students (several languages)

This document will be helpful for those writing a book
http://documentation.openoffice.org/whi ... th_OOo.odt

[John_Ha]

I can reproduce the effect by selecting the text and Format > Character > Position ..., and setting the rotation to 90 degrees. I too found that after just a few lines a new page was created but I did not investigate this further.

Edit: The new page is created following an end of paragraph mark

You should

1. Stop using .rtf. Save the file as a .odt and work in .odt from here on.
2. Check if the Default text style has been set to 90 degrees - if so reset it to 0 degrees.
3. If not, Select all and set the rotation to 0 degrees.

Showing that a problem has been solved helps others searching so, if your problem is now solved, please view your first post in this thread and click the Edit button (top right in the post) and add [Solved] in front of the subject.

[Bill]

Never use the RTF file format for any important documents. There is a reason that a warning is displayed when saving files in the RFT format instead of the ODT format. RTF files produced by AOO are much larger than ODT files, take much longer to open than ODT files and can't save all formatting supported by ODT files.

[Phil Birch]

'

You will find this document be informative on using Styles in Writer:
Writer for students (several languages)

This document will be helpful for those writing a book
http://documentation.openoffice.org/whi ... th_OOo.odt

I did as you said and its back to normal again. Such a simple solution. But one I wish I didnt have to do.