Will Styles Round-Trip to .odt files?

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NisusUser
Posts: 335
Joined: 2011-01-12 05:32:38

Will Styles Round-Trip to .odt files?

Post by NisusUser »

Hi, everybody,

Someone has requested help formatting a 6-page, single-spaced, small font size document he prepared in Apache Office, which I assume is a flavor of Open Office. I have LibreOffice on my Mac, but I'd much, much rather use Nisus Writer Pro. I've opened the file in LibreOffice and saved it as .rtf. Now I have it open in NWP.

If I assign paragraph and character styles in NWP, will they be accessible to the original writer when he opens it in Apache Office?

And another thing while we're at it: the file apparently was created from scanned PDFs that were OCR'd - ugh. What is the best route to clean up everything? Maybe I should just paste the text into TextEdit and save it as a .txt file and then open it in NWP and start from there? Or is there a better way? The file is a formatting mess.

Thank you!
Amontillado
Posts: 48
Joined: 2019-06-20 11:13:06

Re: Will Styles Round-Trip to .odt files?

Post by Amontillado »

The best thing to do would be to test on a file created specifically to explore the style manipulations you're interested in.

I know that when Devonthink detects a Nisus RTF file it won't open it for editing in its internal RTF editor. Styles in Nisus RTF are apparently an extension of standard RTF styles. A good thing, too

ODT is a different file format. My guess, style changes to the document in either word processor will be in force to the other. That's a wild guess. I don't have Libre Office on my system.
NisusUser
Posts: 335
Joined: 2011-01-12 05:32:38

Re: Will Styles Round-Trip to .odt files?

Post by NisusUser »

Thank you, Amontillado.

Here's what I ended up doing: I saved it from NWP as a text file. Then I saved it again as and .rtf file. Then I modified it and made paragraph and character styles that I applied where needed.

I opened that NWP-created file in LibreOffice, and I think everything is there. LibreOffice does seem to mess up some of the spacing a bit, but I'm not sure if that's only on-screen or in final output.

Now I've round-tripped the file, and – best I can tell – LibreOffice didn't mess anything up. The spacing things seem to only be on-screen anomalies.

So I guess it's working as intended. I've sent the file back to the sender with instructions to save it as .rtf, not .odt, the Apache Office default.

Thanks!
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