Limited space in each document one create?

[Kim P. Nyberg]

Immediately after installing OpenOffice on my stationary PC, I could create documents that was +100 pages long. Now, if a document is longer than 14 pages, I have to devide it into numerous documents. Why is that?

And when I copy/paste something into a document, I always have to log out and log in again to add more content. Why is the system like that? It is very annoying.

First and foremost, I use the Writer section for this purpose: I take thousands of documents from EU homepages all the way from the beginning in the early 1950's and up until today. Those documents that does not exist in my native language already, I put in a translation app and from there I store each translated document in the writer. And when I have gathered all documents from one year, I put it online for everybody to see. Some of those documents is way bigger than 14 pages (e.g. Treaties).

Is it a system error from Apache's side or is there anything I can do to fix the said issues I have?

[RoryOF]

When you get to a paragraph end, do you press Enter, or Ctrl Enter Shift Enter?

In OpenOffice one rarely needs to use Ctrl Enter Shift Enter [Read: do not use Ctrl Enter Shift Enter until you know exactly what you are doing].

Use of Ctrl Enter Shift Enter in place of Enter to mark end of paragraphs causes OpenOffice to treat the text as continuous, not as individual paragraphs; you may be running into OpenOffice's inbuilt limitation of 64K chars to a paragraph, which often manifests as about 15 pages of text, and allows no further text be entered.

Turn on /View /Non printing characters. Paragraph marks from Enter will show a a backwards P (recte: a Pilcrow); Ctrl Enter Shift Enter will show as a left pointing hooked arrow, similar to this <-' The same command reverts the display to normal.

Use of Ctrl Enter Shift Enter often occurs as a bad habit brought over from some older word processor.

It would be useful for a speedy diagnosis if you could upload a sample document that had the problem.

[Kim P. Nyberg]

So in short - correct me if I am wrong - what you say is, that if I use Ctrl Enter, it might limit the size of a document. But if I do not touch Ctrl, I can make the documents as long as I please?

[RoryOF]

Exactly so: I have several documents that are 2,000-3,000 pages. More than that may start to run slow.

If the Ctrl Enter Shift Enter characters are coming from imported documents, then you should use /Edit /Paste special : unformatted text.

If you have existing documents using Ctrl Enter Shift Enter, you can convert those characters to Paragraph marks. Use Find and Replace.

Find \n, Replace \n

Drop More Options, select Regular Expressions, then press Replace All

[Kim P. Nyberg]

Ok, then I will try to keep my fingers away from the Ctrl key.

What about the other issue I mentioned. What to do there?

[floris v]

AFAIK, Ctrl+Enter inserts a hard page break. Shift + Enter inserts a line break, but not a paragraph break. The problem with that is: for reasons of their own, the developers of the earliest versions of OpenOffice decided to limit the size of a paragraph to 64 Kb. (For all practical purposes, that should be more than enough. All suggestions for readability of a document start with: don't make your paragraphs very long.) What does this mean? It means that when you are adding text to a paragraph that has a length of near 64 Kb, OpenOffice will disable entering text when you hit that limit, and it will truncate pasted text to fit within that limit without warning. The solution when you are copying and pasting large chunks of text is simple: enter a paragraph break (just Enter) before or after the paste and all will be fine, unless what you are pasting is a single paragraph of over 64 Kb, in which case it will be truncated.
In LibreOffice, this limit has been set to 2^32 or bigger, so you should switch to that.

[Kim P. Nyberg]

Now, I am not the sharpest pen on the table, so how many caracters equals 64 kb?

[robleyd]

It depends; are you using characters that may require more than one byte per character? Anyway, somewhere on the order of 64000. 64 Kb is of course 64 * 1024 (a Kilobyte).

[RoryOF]

@floris v: thank you for the reminder in the above post that the keys are Shift Enter, not Ctrl Enter. I have corrected my posts accordingly.

Let my error be a warning to others against doing too many things simultaneously!

In computing a k is taken to be 1024 characters (think of powers of 2).

[robleyd]

In computing a k is taken to be 1024 characters

Unless you happen to be buying something; manufacturers seem to round the kilobyte and other sizes down.

For instance, this from the Kingston website about USB drives:

Megabyte (MB) = 1,000,000 bytes; 1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1,000,000,000 bytes; 1 Terabyte (TB) = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes

For comparison, a real megabyte is 1048576 bytes.

[Hagar Delest]

That's why we should use the correct symbol. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#Multiple-byte_units
As for the paragraph length: Paragraph cannot be longer than 65534 characters - issue 17171.
The issue is with the current coding of the paragraph size (2^16).
The discussion becomes interesting in comment #56.

[Kim P. Nyberg]

Ok, thanks for the info, guys. Most of the documents I translate is fortunately way shorter than 64 kb.

I take note of the difference of Ctrl+Shift and Ctrl+Enter.

Thank you so much again and have a happy Easter

[Hagar Delest]

We are not talking about the file size, we are talking about the number of characters in a single paragraph (or in a single selection if you copy and paste).
Try to identify where in the source document the limit is when you paste it in the Writer document.
Then copy and paste a chunk of it (before the limit).
Hit return in Writer and copy and paste another chunk of the source document.
If it works well, then is shows that the source document is made of a single paragraph (with line breaks instead of paragraph breaks). If so, you'll have to copy and paste in several pieces. But it will all fit in a single Writer file.

Please add [Solved] at the beginning of the title in your first post (top of the topic) with the 🖉 button if your issue has been fixed.

[JeJe]

If you have some long text with line feed characters you could try pasting it into Notepad as an intermediary and then from there into Writer. That may convert the line feeds to paragraph marks and let you do it in one go instead of in chunks.