OpenOffice fails me again: un-deleteable line breaks in Writer

[SomeGuyDude]

So I made a document in Open Office, and as I did I would type a few asterisks to denote a section break. OO then turns my line of asterisks into a big butt-ugly line, but that's all right since I'm just drafting.

Now it's time to make the final copy, and I don't want the big black things. Here's the problem: THEY CANNOT BE DELETED. If I copy chunks of text above the border into another window, the border FOLLOWS. Even if I don't copy the ENTIRE chunk of text, as long as it's a single letter from the paragraph above.

So I search for a solution, and find "turn off auto-format borders", so I do that. No dice. My document now has giant-*** borders in it permanently. I'm currently working with the notepad equivalent as an intermediate.

I'd use Abi-Word but that thing can't format for crap. I open up my .doc in there and first of all the entire thing is centered now. Secondly my endnotes have been mashed together with the diagrams on the last page. I never thought I'd yearn for MS Word but by gum I do now.

All right, rant over.

[Fonon]

I've had these same problems at one time. I solved it somehow, but I do remember that it gave me great frusturation.

I didn't do this, but why not try to edit the .doc itself in gedit/ other text editor, and see if you can remove the bigass line?

[RussianVodka]

Ask not what Open Source can do for you, but what you can do for open source!

But yeah, I've experienced problems like that in both OO and MSO. I don't know how to solve them, and at least for me, they don't occur nearly enough for it to be bothersome.

[jviscosi]

Turning asterisks into a butt-ugly line sounds like something that should be turn-offable in auto-format/auto-correct somewhere. Is there no option for that? (I don't have OO in front of me.)

Of course now that you have them, it's too late to turn them off, even if you could. What if you do something like save the file in a prior OO format, do the lines go away then?

[bruce89]

I'd use Abi-Word but that thing can't format for crap. I open up my .doc in there and first of all the entire thing is centered now. Secondly my endnotes have been mashed together with the diagrams on the last page. I never thought I'd yearn for MS Word but by gum I do now.

Why did you save this file as a binary doc? You can't blame AbiWord for bad formatting when you're using a non-documented format.

Personally, I'd use LaTeX for anything major.

[akiratheoni]

I get similar problems in MS Word at school... I make a line with the dashes (----) to make a longer line that stretches across the page. But if I haven't typed anything below the line then put my cursor above it, I can't delete nor go below that line. It's very annoying.

[jasay]

I tried it just to see what was going on and found that highlighting the line and hitting ctl+shift+space (default formating) removed the line for me.

[50words]

Put the cursor on the line and clear all formatting in the styles menu. Line gone.

OOo really emphasis styles. Nearly everything you do is style-related in one way or another. And don't forget that each kind of style (paragraph, page, list) is independent and you can stack them.