replacing only text portions

users
#1

Good evening
I am writing a book with Writer (3.6.6.2 / Windows). In connection with
this endeavor I already asked a few questions and there are more to come ...

Well, the original is written in Japanese, about 200 pages A5 size with
60 something pictures.
Of this I have a "normal" Writer file with the pictures in color (ca. 45
MB).
To make a "Kindle-friendly" version (following Amazon instructions), I
made another file, in which I replace the color pictures by gray-scale
pictures (ca. 14 MB).

Now I have rewritten (not translated) the whole thing in German and are
in the process of editing that material.
To edit (apply corrections / changes) I use the Writer file with the
gray-scale pictures.
After I finish, I would like to COPY the entire text, including styles
and formatting, and replace the text ONLY in the old Writer file with
the Japanese text (all the formatting is kept) and the color pictures.

I tried to "select all" and then copy, but that also replaces the color
pictures with the gray-scale pictures. If I select the "text only"
option, all formatting and the pictures are lost.

Is there a trick to achieve this feat? Or do I have to copy 200 pages
worth of text piece by piece? Or, alternatively, replace 60+ pictures
one by one including all the settings that go with it?

Thank you.

Thomas

#2

When you perform a text only paste, you say "paste only the text but
ignore any images that are in the clipboard". This does not mean "only
over-write the text and leave existing graphics"

I cannot think of a good / easy way to do this. If I had to solve this
problem, I would probably use a macro to copy the color images into the
document containing the gray-scale images. This assumes that there is
some "easy" way for a macro to understand how to associate a specific
color image to a specific gray-scale image so that it can be replaced.

I am sorry that it is not much of an answer, but the specifics to solve
the issue using a macro are highly dependent on how the match could be
made between documents.

#3

Hi :slight_smile:
I tried
Ctrl shift v
to paste as "unformatted text" but then you would have to go through and re-apply styles to all the headings and stuff.  So i tried "as rtf" and that made an amazing mess but did get rid of the images.  Well it seemed to replace them all with coding and weirdness but that was mostly reasonably easy to remove.  Even so it might have been faster&easier to just paste all the images properly and then remove the images.

So, it might be easier to do it the other way around?  Create a copy of the document that has the wrong images and then copy&paste the right images over the top?

I couldn't seem to select multiple images from a Writer document and have troubles with that before.  I try to use Draw if i know in advance that images are going to be the main thing about a document but for most documents i'm a bit stuck through lack of knowledge.  It's not really a huge enough problem for me so i have never tried to figure it out.

Doing 1 image at a time does seem to retain the images properties, such as hyper-links, resizing, anchor points, wrap values.  After doing several that were "Anchored to paragraph" i found most positioned themselves in exactly the right place on the page but a couple didn't.  If the images are anchored to page they do always choose the right position.  I'm not sure about "to" or "as" character.

It has only just occurred to me that you might be able to do this better by "hacking" the odt as a zip-file.  You know you can rename the file-ending from .odt to .zip and then when you open you see folders such as "images"?  Can you copy&paste the entire image folder from one to the other?  I'm not sure though.  Do the image files appear to have the same names in both documents?  If the names are different then it probably wont work. 
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: