Re: OpenOffice exporting to Word

Subject: Re: OpenOffice exporting to Word
From: Gary Schnabl <gSchnabl -at- LivernoisYards -dot- com>
To: TechWrl list <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:44:20 -0400

Jay Maechtlen wrote:
> What gets messed up?
> Well:
>
> Captions get put into text boxes, hence the Table of Figures won't update.
> Section breaks are placed before the heading for each TOC/TOF/etc
> then between each of those headings and the table itself, then after the
> table.
>
> Headings get lost after the first TOC/TOF, probably due to the multitude
> of section breaks
>
> - a clue may be that the TOCs show up as 'protected sections'. Maybe
> OpenOffice is trying to protect the tables from manual revisions?
>
> Some graphics get lost or mangled. Mostly those grouped with callouts
> and such.
>
> Anyway, those are the major hurdles. I may try copy-and-paste for the
> graphics, to see if the two apps speak the same clipboard formats.
>
> - Jay
>

You could utilize the master-document functionality in OpenOffice. It is
far superior to what Word has in that regard. Word uses the text boxes
for many conversions. Manually fixing them afterwards is no problem,
unless you are working on a book that has over 200 figures, like the
book edition I started revising today. [However, I am using FrameMaker
for that book, whose first edition the author initially produced with a
Word DOC file--some 150 MB worth. That book sporadically caused Word to
crash--hence the eventual conversion to FrameMaker, plus getting other
features that Word lacks in that process.]

I often use OpenOffice for original entry and then convert the ODT file
to DOC and just import the DOC file afterwards into FrameMaker (with or
without using MS Word as an intermediary application). Strip off the TOC
before conversion to Word from OpenOffice (but keeping a PDF exported
from the original ODT file handy, for getting the subheads in correct
order--in case something goes haywire).

Anchored frames from OpenOffice sometimes crash when converted to Word.
Why? I do not know, as I tried to get some ideas from the OpenOffice
developers on that.

On another issue, sometimes DOC files imported into FrameMaker seem to
work fine. However, upon saving and reopening, the newly created FM file
will not open, the alert citing insufficient RAM in my system, although
the system has 2 GB (or 8 GB for the main machine) without anything else
running. In a case like that, simply strip out all the graphics (even
one such graphic left behind might cause a crash...) and then import
them afterwards. That always worked fine.

Gary
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