i could cry, really

[erastes]

TWICE I’ve read through and commented on a friend’s WIP – The twice is because I did it once up to page 100, then when I re-opened it, 96 pages had disappeared and I was left with six pages only. I swore, re-opened the original document and did it again.

this morning, I opened the document again, ready to finish it off, and ALL my amendments show as double words e.g. where I’ve corrected alright to all right – the text now shows this alrightright. And what’s worse – ALL my “sticky notes” have gone – about 50 of them.

I could cry. Really. I don’t think i have the heart to do it all again.

Does anyone know why this is? I’m using an RTF document in Open Office – I have “record” and “show changes” ticked. I don’t HAVE Word on the laptop, I can’t afford it, so unless I sit down at the desktop and do it all again, I don’t know what to do.

I managed 1060 words on my own novel at least, and deleted a good few that i’d written before, so probably 1500 words in total, but I don’t count it like that or you’d never get anywhere. The one snag about learning about one’s character (please notice i don’t call him a protagonist, although i’m sure he thinks he is) at the same pace as the reader is that as you get to know him (just as in real life) you discover things about him half way through the book that you didn’t know at the beginning. This is fine, but as it’s first person, I’ve had to do a little retrofitting to give a sense of what I do find out. If i don’t do that, people will be going WTF? As I did…If I do it, it’s ok. If the reader does it, not so much.

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Comments

[m-barnette.livejournal.com]

Open office is, as far as I can tell, more bother than it's worth.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I love it for many many reasons, this is the first problem I've had with it. Without it, what do I do? I don't have any other programme.

[m-barnette.livejournal.com]

I heard somewhere that Microsoft had made word available for free, but I don't know where you'd find it.

Maybe it isn't you, but the file the other person sent.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

This is a possibility.
Also, it might help to take the initial document to some format that Open Office is comfortable with, like your latest version, and recheck if a few changes stick. over 100 pages is a big document, a lot of people would break that up into chunks, even in Word, which freaks at larger stuff also.
Were you saving frequently as you went, or did all the changes and then saved it in one go?

[tiggothy.livejournal.com]

The only time I had a problem with using the sticky notes is when I tried to save a file as a word doc after adding them. It just took them out. At a guess I would say it's something to do with saving it back as RTF. With the sticky notes, it probably needs saving as an ODT file... unless it's something you've not had any issues with before (in which case, I'm stuck).

No idea about your first problem though. Unless it's something like it's saving it to a corrupted sector on the disk or that?

[eledhwenlin]

It's the RTF file. RTF support isn't so good in OOO (neither in MS Word, I must say). Either save to ODF or DOC for the file you're editing.

That said, why RTF? It's pretty much the most useless format I've ever encountered.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

that was the format the file was sent to me in - so I assumed that it would be ok.

[eledhwenlin]

No, I meant, why would anyone even want to write in RTF? It's like the bastard child of TXT and DOC. :-/

[m-barnette.livejournal.com]

Publishers require RTF because it cannot carry a virus.

[eledhwenlin]

Ah, I see.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

It's a primitive format and most programs can at least open it up.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

I've never been able to save tracking changes in anything but .DOC format. In PDF Reader (which you can get for free, as opposed to the hideously expensive Adobe Acrobat), you can leave the equivalent of sticky notes for the writer, but it isn't really the same.

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

If that's mine then (A) I'm sorry! and (b) *do* give up because I hate to be responsible for doing this to you. And (c) I'm sorry!

[essayel.livejournal.com]

*hugs* it's so awful when that happens. I have no useful suggestions to make, just sympathy to offer.

[johnrw.livejournal.com]

The RTF format is massively limited and to my knowledge different WP packages handle it slightly differently, as do different iterations of the same package.

(speaking as one who's used MS Word 6, 97, 2000, WP Office 5,6, 10 ,12 Open Office V1.4, 2.1 through 2.43 currently 3.1 and 3.2)

Best option?

Open the original file do the editing and save in your WP native format as well. If anything happens to the RTF version then use the native copy to save as RTF. You'll lose tracking data but that's always chancy and mainly just causes file bloat.

Strange that the publisher requires RTF. The only reason I can think of it that it's easy to strip out fancy formatting instructions.

[seraphim-grace.livejournal.com]

umm, the double word thing as far as i remember it's how it shows it on the page
when you save or view it outside the track changes bit it's just the amendments that show
it kinda sucks for doing amendments unfortunately, all i can say is highlight them in another font and don't do it as track changes

[taylorbooks.livejournal.com]

That's horrible! I have a huge fear of that kind of thing. I'm constantly saving things into PDF, or backing up on an external hard drive (but not nearly as much as I should). Hope you don't have to do it again and can tell them what's happened!