Thanks for the suggestion Robert. I can just set the borders to blank and that disappears them BUT I expect the boxes still exist and may complicate future cut and paste operations. There is no "delete" function when you highlight the border so I can't directly delete the boxes. All I can do is highlight the entire box and delete everything and I could do that and then paste back the original text. I had thought of that but the work involved suggests that a better way is probably available, I just don't know it!
I suspected that your comment about heavily edited documents going bad and that's why I mentioned it. Same reason I don't use templates because they are not guaranteed to be compatible when changing word processors. In this case some HTML formatting may have been picked up in paste operations too; I really don't know. Thanks for the reply. John ====== On Wed, 2025-05-21 at 15:57 -0400, Robert Funnell wrote: > John - > > I have nothing very valuable to contribute. Hopefully someone else will. > I can say that over the years I've had large heavily edited documents go > bad, apparently getting confused, and exhibiting strange behaviour. > > Does it work to remove an individual box by copying its contents, > deleting the box, and pasting the contents back into the document? > > - Robert > > > On 2025 May 21 12:09:29, John Iliffe wrote: > > I'm not sure what I did or what is misconfigured but I am unable to back it > > out. > > > > I entered a fairly long change in an existing document in plain text and > > then formatted it > > afterwards. At one point it seemed logical to emphasize what I was saying > > by putting the text > > in a > > text box which I have done many times before in previous versions of LO. > > This time I was unable > > to > > get the text box to stay while I pasted the text so I Googled how and found > > that I had to hit a > > character before I placed the cursor in the box. So I hit an 'X' and the > > box stayed but I was > > unable to paste into it. Finally ended up typing everything inside. I set > > the border to right > > shadow and everything seemed as expected. > > > > BUT: > > > > There are many (dozens) of text boxes now spread though the document and I > > don't know how to get > > rid > > of them. The preference seems to be for bulleted lists, of which there are > > many, to have each > > list > > item boxed but some paragraphs have been boxed too, sort of randomly. > > > > Some boxes are supposed to be there and were in the original that I was > > editing but most are not > > required at all. Edit|Undo doesn't get rid of them and now I have saved > > the document so as not > > to > > lose the updates so I can't try that again. > > > > The problem here is that I am updating a chapter of a book and I could pull > > it in from the > > previous > > edition but then I would have to find and retype all the changes and there > > is no reference for > > that. > > The chapter is 37 pages long and contains embedded graphics so I have to be > > careful what I > > change. > > In the end I would still need to insert the text box. > > > > To add insult to injury I'm on a deadline to get the next edition out. > > > > Has anyone any idea what might have happened? Better yet how can I unbox > > all the previously > > existing text without losing the text in the boxes? It is possible that > > while typing I > > accidentally hit a control key but if so I don't know which. > > > > Info: LO 24.8.6.2 (X86_64) > > Fedora 41 > > Document is in .odt format but has been edited/converted many times in > > other word processors > > starting with Word Perfect 5! > > > > Any suggestions very much appreciated! > > > > John > > ====== -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
