General Error saving

[leloft]

Hi. New Member. Greetings. I installed OO today to replace LO on one host (this one). I am getting a general error when I try to save an *.odt or *.ott. I know this is a widespread and old problem and I've followed most of the relevant advice. Specifically, I have deleted my user profile, reinstalled both OO and jre. It is not a permissions issue. However, I can confirm that saving OO files as *.rtf or *.html save without error warnings, although the same file will give the error message if saved as an odt or ott. The files themselves don't seem to be corrupted as I can reopen them and re-save them any number of times.

So: why does the error message occur with odt or ott files and not with rtf or html ones?

Many thanks.

[Hagar Delest]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Are they existing files or new ones?
Why "go back" from LO to AOO? AOO does not benefit from the dev momentum that moved to LO. There are many issues like this one that have no root cause identified yet and that are just not occurring with LO.

[leloft]

The files are both 'old' (LO) ones, although they were only created this morning, and 'new' ones created post-install and re-install within OO.

(OT: The decision to revert to OO on one host is that I have a large writing project that I need to outline and number. I have never got on with LO's 'outlining' capability. It's too cumbersome: in MS Word 2000, 'outlining' used to be a background process which allowed the 'thinking' processes to occupy the foreground; whereas in LO, outlining is so clunky that it displaces the threads of thought and defeats the purpose of outlining. I have used text-based alternatives (e.g.treeline) to create outlines quickly for the above reason. My hope is that by 'going back' to OO, I can regain some of this lost creative agility.)

[Hagar Delest]

If you create new files from scratch, do you get the same error?

LO and AOO are based on the same code and I don't think there are any significant difference between both for the outline numbering.
You have to use the menu Tools > Heading numbering in LO (Tools > Outline numbering in AOO IIRC). Complex feature, yes because it allows wide fine tuning. Clunky, I wouldn't say that.

[leloft]

Clunky, I wouldn't say that.

Well, horses for courses but I find the LO system cumbersome. Outlining is a very early drafting process, applying styling is a late pre-publishing stage. I require 4 functions from outlining: promote and demote text with its subpoints; move text with its subpoints to a different location in the document. These need to be typed: I use Ctrl-Alt_Left, Ctrl-Alt-Right, Ctrl-Alt-Up, Ctrl-Alt-Down respectively. I need to be able to copy text from one document, Ctrl-X, and paste it into a second document, Ctrl-V, with the same font, size and place in the numbering hierarchy as the character under the cursor. What I do not want is to be distracted by, or worse having to repair elements of styles that get carried with the draft text. This applies particularly when trying to construct a numbered outline.

The above shortcuts do not require me to lift my hands from the typing position. Having to switch from typing to mouse and right clicking in the navigator or the style format window, drop down menus etc means physically picking up a different tool and moving my hands from, and then back to, the typing position, hence clunky. Unforgivably, it breaks my concentration: I need to give the drafting process my full attention and swapping tasks can be fatal to a subtle or nuanced idea.

Do one thing and do it well. Outlining and styling are separated in time and process; they should be separate functions. But I guess that more people want to write prettily than write intelligently and so that's the way the software is developed. My hope was that the OO outlining facility would be less bloated than LO, simply because it hasn't been 'improved'; my impression is that it is certainly more nimble than LO. But as I cannot run OO alongside LO (in Debian), I may just run MSWord 2000 in an XP VM. Crazy!

[Hagar Delest]

I don't know what kind of tool you've previously used but MS Word works exactly the same as AOO/LO (I use it every day at work).
You can set the numbering the way you like and then fine tune the style at the very end. They are indeed separate things that happen to be managed in the same feature but you can still focus one one aspect and wait until the end to fix the look.
There are shortcuts to apply heading styles, so no need to use the mouse at all (Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2...).
You are the first one ranting about that in the forum (separating the features), never saw such request before (almost 20 years now). You might have to reconsider how more intelligently you write than most of us all.

For the record, AOO and LO can be used in parallel on any GNU/Linux distro (and Windows too). Only one will benefit from the desktop integration of course but that doesn't prevent the use of the other one.

Using such a deprecated version of MS Word on a VM would be a real joke.