retaining formatting

[jeffdotraymond]

I did my best to review the manual and the conversations here, so apologies in advance if this is covered elsewhere. I love this thing, but the one maddening bit I keep running into is that it will not retain formatting. The minute I import and export again, it reverts back to the standard NovelLibre format, and poorly - italicized words become italicized lines or paragraphs, underlined segments disappear entirely, centered text is aligned leftward.

Example of itals:

Imported example::

Exported example:

This is really just a QOL thing, but as this particular manuscript grows it's going to be increasingly problematic to have to fix over and over again if I want to keep using this. Any advice?

[peter88213]

The minute I import and export again, it reverts back to the standard NovelLibre format,

Thanks for your feedback. I think I understand your problem, and I'm afraid that It is part of the fundamental concept of novelibre. It is important to note that novelibre stores the entire text in its own format and only creates ODT manuscripts as temporary files for editing purposes. However, this means that novelibre does not support all formatting options available in LibreOffice Writer due to restrictions in its file format. The details are described in the user manual:
https://peter88213.github.io/nvhelp-en/basic_concepts.html#formatting-text

First of all, it is not recommended to manually renew unsupported formatting in every session. Instead, you can customize the existing paragraph and character styles to suit your own preferences. Keep in mind that italics are converted to the “Emphasis” character style, and bold text is converted to the “Strong emphasis” character style (which is not displayed in bold in my default template, but in uppercase letters). So if you absolutely need underlining (which is actually rather unusual in prose literature), you can use “Emphasis” or “Strong emphasis” and set these up with underlining in your document template.
You can then set this document template in the novelibre export options, and your manuscript will look appropriately in every session.
https://peter88213.github.io/nvhelp-en/preparations.html#customizing-the-look-of-your-manuscript

The same applies to centered text. In addition to the usual paragraphs with or without first line indentation, novelibre also has “Quotations” as a special paragraph style. If necessary, you can define this as centered in your document template. If you use chapter epigraphs, you can center them using the applicable paragraph styles if necessary.

I know that this approach is unusual for many writers. Strictly speaking, this is an advanced concept in LibreOffice Writer, whereby you first set up your templates and styles in order to achieve a consistent look for your text documents. When designing manuscripts, the rule of thumb is basically not to overdo the formatting. However, if typographical features are a characteristic of your text, you might want to wait until the prepress stage to add them. If this is no option, novelibre might not be the right software for you.

italicized words become italicized lines or paragraphs

If that's the case, it could be a bug. Are you using the latest version of novelibre? Under no circumstances should the software italicize text that was not previously italicized. A minimal ODT manuscript that allows the error to be reproduced would be very helpful.

If you have any questions about setting up your document template, I will be happy to try to help you. However, it would be useful to familiarize yourself with the topic in the LibreOffice documentation first.

I have programmed two extensions that make it easier to use document templates and styles -- perhaps this will give you some insights?

• StyleSwitcher:
  Quickly switch between the style sheets of different document templates.
• emph:
  Use character styles instead of direct formatting to mark up text.

Cheers,
Peter

[peter88213]

For the time being, I added an admonition to the user manual:
https://peter88213.github.io/nvhelp-en/basic_concepts.html#formatting-text

[peter88213]

I finally found out how to programmatically reset the character styles with LibreOffice. I just released a new version of the emph extension, which provides a "D" button for LibreOffice for resetting the character style.

[peter88213]

This is an unpublished beta test version that might fix the issue:

https://github.com/peter88213/novelibre/raw/novelibre5/dist/novelibre_v5.44.3.pyz

Would you mind installing this version on a trial basis and working with it as usual? Please let me know if this solves the problem of unwanted italicized text passages.

[jeffdotraymond]

Finally got a chance to download and try it out. The good news is that the italicized formatting issue was solved. It looks like it doesn't like a handful of center justifications / underlines (as explained in the manual, obv.) but that's absolutely an easily-addressed issue in a way the italic thing wasn't.

Appreciate your help on this. Will continue to use 44.3 and report back with any other oddities.

[peter88213]

Great. Then we've solved a technical problem that didn't occur for me due to the way I work (I deliberately use styles only).
It's really important to get feedback from a wider range of users in order to improve the software. Thanks again.
I will release version 5.44.3 soon, along with some plugin updates.
As for your actual problem, I will provide some explanations about the concept of novelibre in a new thread below.

[peter88213]

Comments on the concept of text formatting with novelibre

I was a member of a writing group for many years. Before Christmas, we used to compile our best texts in an anthology, which we had printed as a book to give away as a present. My task was to typeset the book for printing. To do this, I learned the basic rules of book typography. Each time, I received around a hundred texts by email that had been written using different word processing software.

For book printing, it was important to clean up these text files first. Most of my friends were not familiar enough with their software to use consistent formatting templates. Instead, different margins, line spacing, and font sizes often appeared within a single document, either because they had been set accidentally or had been copied and pasted from other documents. Sometimes paragraphs or their first lines were indented with tabs or spaces. In any case, it was tedious work because I couldn't just iron everything out, but had to preserve or restore the important text highlighting. I must emphasize that these inaccuracies are not really harmful, and the authors themselves would not have noticed them in most cases. It is simply a sign of the power of word processors, which allow for virtually any formatting. But for self-publishing, this creates a lot of additional work in the follow-up.

With this in mind, I designed a program that does this work already during the manuscript creation phase. novelibre discards virtually all user formatting when importing documents and generates a very neat document when re-exporting, with uniform headings and paragraphs, as well as syntactic text highlighting using a limited number of style sheets. By syntactic highlighting, I mean that, for example, instead of appearing in italics, the meaning "emphasized" is assigned. The whole thing follows the concept of separating content and presentation, as is ubiquitous in contemporary IT.

I realize that something like this is completely irrelevant to the writer at first; the main thing is that the desired text appears in italics on the screen. But with novelibre, I really want to have advanced software that unlocks the true power of OpenOffice/LibreOffice, which lies in the document templates.

The point that can be debated is how many different style templates you actually need for a prose text. With novelibre, the number is minimal because this keeps the complexity and error-prone nature of the program code within limits. That's why it was relatively easy to solve the problem described above with unwanted italics.

[jeffdotraymond]

100% get it. I will say that novelibre was recommended as perhaps something different than what it is intended to be which is fine, and is still a) incredibly useful for my use case and b) will make me a better LO user too. So it's win / win. Thanks for making it.

[peter88213]

You're welcome. I would now like to return to the topic of centering and underlining. In your screenshot, it looks as if the paragraph formatted in this way is actually a subheading, used to indicate a change in point of view or plot line. According to the concept of novelibre, such a heading would appear at the beginning of a section to which the corresponding point of view or plot line would be assigned. If this corresponds to a fixed system, i.e., each section should have a heading, there is a way to have novelibre automate this with the help of the nv_custom_export plugin. It comes with several sample templates, including one that precedes each section with a heading featuring the viewpoint character. However, this only applies to the final document, not to the working manuscript.

Perhaps a new feature that I added today in version 5.44.4 will be more helpful to you. You can now use fifth to ninth level headings within sections.
To stick with your example: In OpenOffice/LibreOffice Writer, place the cursor on “Rebecca Whitmer” and press Ctrl-5. This formats the line as Heading 5. There is no need for a blank line between the heading and the body text; it is better to set the spacing below the heading in the paragraph style. You can also use this opportunity to set other properties for this heading style, such as underlining. To ensure that everything is retained for future work sessions, save your work document and select it in the novelibre export options under Select document template.

Good luck,
Peter

Update

I decided to set up the project wiki and provide a How-To page on this topic:
https://github.com/peter88213/novelibre/wiki/How-to-set-up-a-subheading-for-use-within-sections