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Hello,
Seems I've found a new & especially annoying problem.
A document I've had on disk for several years & have printed without problems before, has now come to the point where some paragraphs do not print at all - although they appear on-screen OK & I can find no formatting or other setting difference between the text which prints & that which does not, except that one does & the other does not print.
I really do not wish to have to completely re-enter the entire document, all over again (& hope that whatever caused the non-print problem does not occur again, anyway).
Does any one have any thoughts as to a possible cause -- I will investigate all angles I'm able to do.
Thanks for your assistance.
George E Noon
"George E Noon" <ge.noon@verizon.net> wrote in message news:4F1D0CA7.90304@verizon.net...
Hello,
Seems I've found a new & especially annoying problem.
A document I've had on disk for several years & have printed without problems before, has now come to the point where some paragraphs do not print at all - although they appear on-screen OK & I can find no formatting or other setting difference between the text which prints & that which does not, except that one does & the other does not print.
I really do not wish to have to completely re-enter the entire document, all over again (& hope that whatever caused the non-print problem does not occur again, anyway).
Does any one have any thoughts as to a possible cause -- I will investigate all angles I'm able to do.
Thanks for your assistance.
George E Noon
What happens if you copy/paste one of the offending paragraphs into a new and otherwise empty Writer document and then print that? Does that give you any clues?
Are the offending paragraphs the result of tracked changes (Reviews) which have been suppressed/rejected?
See the Help under "changes">"review function" - at least that's where it is in OpenOffice; I don't have LO on this system.
"George E Noon" <ge.noon@verizon.net> wrote in message news:4F1D0CA7.90304@verizon.net...
Hello,
Seems I've found a new & especially annoying problem.
A document I've had on disk for several years & have printed without problems before, has now come to the point where some paragraphs do not print at all - although they appear on-screen OK & I can find no formatting or other setting difference between the text which prints & that which does not, except that one does & the other does not print.
I really do not wish to have to completely re-enter the entire document, all over again (& hope that whatever caused the non-print problem does not occur again, anyway).
Does any one have any thoughts as to a possible cause -- I will investigate all angles I'm able to do.
Thanks for your assistance.
George E Noon
Another thought, from OOo's Help:
==== begin quote =====
To Hide Text From Printing
Any Writer text frame can be set to a mode which allows viewing the text on screen, but hides the text from printing.
Select the text frame (you see the eight handles).
Choose Format - Frame/Object - Options.
In the Properties area, unmark the Print check box and click OK.
=== end quote =====
Two thoughts: I think LO has some feature that lets you see hidden features, like carriage returns, new paragraph
indicators, etc. I haven't used the feature, but I believe it's there--like in WordPerfect. If so, turn it on, and look for
something strange around the paragraphs that don't print.
Second: If you have any printed copy (from back when it worked) scan it in and use OCR to translate it back to
text. Then--you'll have to proof-read it, of course--enter it into some word processor and print it from there.
Clumsy, but much better than typeing the whole thing over.
--doug
Hi,
Posted last night while quite tired & annoyed -- neglected to include info on my set-up;
I am using Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric, LO 3.4.4, have an Epson Stylus-C120 printer - my computer is built on an Asus P5K-V motherboard with Intel Core 2 duo CPU E6550 @ 2.33GHz × 2. Not sure what other info would be helpful, but if someone could tell me which terminal commands to give, I can respond with the output of it.
I really have no idea of what has caused this problem, as the file had always printed out just fine previously.
Thank you,
George
Harold,
Thanks for your reply.
When I copied & pasted the page in question, the result was unchanged; all was visible on-screen, but the 2 last paragraphs did not print. In those 2 paragraphs, I am unable to find any setting which would account for their 'going invisible'...
As to the Help "changes">"review function" -- that does not seem to have any join to what my problem is, in fact it only refers to spreadsheets.
I see that you are in London -- not that that, or where my dad's family comes from has a thing to do with anything, but I'll toss it in anyway; my dad's father was from the village of Arnold in Nottinghamshire UK & came to the USA on the Lucitania (sister ship to the ill-fated Lusitania), on its last voyage across the Atlantic before WWI. I had an Uncle Harry Noone, from Notts, who was a Crown Chauffeur [I may have the term wrong, but he drove for the Government], had been Master of two different Masonic Lodges there, and spent his final days as a resident of the Masonic Home in York
Any way, thanks for your attempts to help - small world & seemingly smaller, daily & if we are not helping one another, thing would really look bleak.
George
Harold,
Yes, I have checked this out - but the only way I am able to select text does not result in the eight handles you refer to, but to the whole block of text selected, that is enclosed in a light blue shaded 'box' & the "Format - Frame/Object - Option" is grayed-out [not selectable]. So, I'd say it is not the path to follow.
thanks very much for your efforts.
George
George,
This may not be at all helpful, as I am by no means an LO expert, but I have a couple ideas...
1. Have you tried saving it to a PDF file? I was once getting strange printing behavior when I used LO with the Linux Libertine font, but if I saved it to a PDF file first, my output showed up properly.
2. Also, when I get strange behavior in a formatted document, as a last resort, I'll save it as a straight text (.txt) file with all formatting stripped. I can then test it to see if it will print properly. If so, I can then rebuild the formatting. It's a pain, yes, but it's better than retyping the whole document. (But, as a caution, saving as a .txt file will also strip your footnotes)
Virgil (not from London, but Ohio)
What part doesn't print? If it's always at the end, check the print setting to make sure it's set to print all pages.
If that does not seem to be the problem, have you rebooted? I would not expect this to change much, but it might.
Did you try exporting it in various formats, then reimporting it? If you've had it for several years, it's probably more likely in *.doc than any other format. Have you tried exporting it as RTF and OpenOffice format plus text?
Do you still get the problem exporting it as text, reimporting then printing it? If you still get the problem, you must have some funny control characters that get exported with the text. There are tools to scan for characters that are NOT vanilla ascii, but I'm not familiar with them. Once you can get the text to print as you want, you need to restore formatting and anything else in the original file. I'd delete all the text that does not print plus a bit more, verify that everything retained prints, then add back the text deleted from the *.txt version. If that does not work, then I'd work from the *.txt version and add all the formatting, etc., a part at a time, saving intermediate files until you get what you want.
"Binary search" techniques could speed this work, potentially: If you have one version that has the problem and another version that doesn't, then identify the differences and systematically try a version roughly half way between one that works and one that doesn't until you fix the problem.
Hope this helps.
Spencer
Doug,
I used to use WordPerfect [first the Novel product, and then the Corel, after they'd obtained it], so I am aware of the type of feature you are referring to, though I cannot find it in LO, at all.
As to your second suggestion, I own two scanners, but neither will do anything at all connected to my Ubuntu Gnu/Linux Box (I guess I'm just lucky that way) need a good list somewhere - like the open printing list that indicates which are excellent, good, fair, and useless in the scanner world. Seems these two I have are - so far as Linux is concerned, just good as door-stops.
Thank you so much for your helpful comments.
George
Thank you, Virgil; I'll give those suggestions a try (& luckily, as the document in question is a Fraternal body's By-Laws, there are no foot-notes).
I'll be ery happy if either of them works -- though, of course, I'd be happiest to actually understand what caused the problem, to begin with. But, then i do realize that we all too seldom get what we want, especially when it would actually be good for us.
George
Spencer,
The document in question is a set of the By-Laws of an Odd Fellow Lodge that I happen to have been Secretary of for 19 years, now. I've had it since January, 2002, when as Lodge Secretary, I was named Clerk of the Committee tasked with 'revising & updating the Lodge's By-Laws.
I originally had it as a WordPerfect document (& I had a Star Office document version when I came upon and tried that for a while) - I changed over to Ubuntu Linux (Breezy) in 2006 & proceeded to migrate all my document folder contents to it & they've been in Ubuntu program files ever since.
Odd, but i was not that fond of Star Office - but when i got to using Ubuntu, i took right to OOo, which came out of Star Office, as I understand it. Switched to Libre Office a bout a year ago 7 this is really the first problem I've had with it.
The parts that don't print are all full paragraphs --- but I can not find any reason for their not printing in either printer settings nor in any LO settings that I have been able to find.
No, i haven't rebooted -- if I were still running MS Windows, that would have been my first choice - but so far that has never been a necessity with Linux, thankfully. I will give it a try - though, if only to eliminate it as something needed.
I have most of my documents in standard open document format [whatever LO defaults to, at the time] - I do make MS Word compatible ' .doc' copies, though - so if I need to e-mail to others i don't get a whiney reply back that your document was unreadable.
I guess it would also be a good idea to convert to PDF, as well -- that might be a solution, or, at least a problem revealer.
Thank you for your suggestions & I'll be trying them out & perhaps I'll be inspired to search further to see if I've 'gained' some strange setting somewhere or other...
George
Hello George,
George E Noon wrote (23-01-12 08:30)
A document I've had on disk for several years & have printed without
problems before, has now come to the point where some paragraphs do not
print at all - although they appear on-screen OK & I can find no
[...]
- Any chance to share (part of) such a document with us (via website or so)?
Cheers,
George E Noon wrote (23-01-12 19:59)
Doug,
I used to use WordPerfect [first the Novel product, and then the Corel,
after they'd obtained it], so I am aware of the type of feature you are
referring to, though I cannot find it in LO, at all.
Format > Character > Text effects ... > hidden.
And Tools > Options > Writer > Print .... > hidden text
An idea based on my experience with this type of long-lived document. Look for a corruption in the file format. Look for an older version of it (from your archive / backup systems) that might print correctly.
True, this idea comes from experience with M$ products. But the formats are not so much different. A long document that receives hundreds of small changes over a period of 1 or 2 years is likely to acquire a format corruption. One such sign is a difference between the file size as reported by LibreOffice and the file size as reported by disk file manager in OS.
Cor,
I checked both the cited spots;
the first, with the non-printing text selected -- hidden is _not_ checked
the second, 'hidden text' and 'text placeholder' are _not_ checked - the other options under 'contents' are but do not appear to be anything to cause this problem.
George
Cor,
Yes, I'd be willing to share a part of the document [or even the whole thing - its only 9 pages US letter size).
How and where do I up load it to ---- I assume you don't want attachments sent to the list (a huge waste of bandwidth!)
George
David,
Thank you!
You just may have hit upon something.
I have an older (continually updated Ubuntu on another HDD, its copy of the same file is slightly larger --- the one with non-printing bits is a 367.5kb file & the older one is 371.1kb ---- the difference is only 3.6 kb - but that could just be where the 'wrinkle' is hidden...
Now, well - more likely in the morning after I've slept some, "ill have to smitch to the other Ubuntu install & try printing from that file. Really hope that is the cure.
Thanks!
George
Hi 
You can upload to Nabble. Once you have followed the links or navigated to
your thread here it is very much like attaching to an email. Even people
that are not using Nabble can see the uploaded file then
Regards from
Tom
Hi George,
This isn't an answer to your printing problem, but I think you mentioned in one of your posts about you had two scanners that didn't work with Ubuntu. May I ask what the make and models are? I've installed Ubuntu on over 20 computers, originally starting with 8.10, and every version since including 11.10. I only ever had one time that I had a scanner problem, and that was very easy to fix, although I would need to research what I did. As I recall I simply added the scanner name to a master file on the system. If you use xsane as your scanner program, doesn't it see either of your scanners?
Don