[Solved] Gray Blocks Acting As Speed Bumps

[Dreamdeer]

I keep getting random parts of my writing blocked in gray. I can work either in the white area or the gray area, but I can't just move naturally from one to the other, I have to click into the space or out of it, which slows me down a lot.

Although it happens randomly in all my work, it happens most often in one particular mess that I've been trying to untangle. That is, a file that got corrupted in my old WordPerfect program, which I regretfully had to replace with OpenOffice because Microsoft apparently booby-trapped the computer against WP. Being unable to open that file in either WordPerfect or Open Office, I opened up a version full of gobbledeygook in Wordpad, copied that to OpenOffice, and have been trying to weed out the nonsense. But I can't weed out the gray areas if I don't know what they are.

Sometimes I can erase the gray just by deleting the space right before they start or right inside. Sometimes part of the gray goes away if I make a space right before the gray, but then I can't tab there. However, it seems up to the whim of the computer as to when this will and won't work, and won't happens more often than will.

I saw that somebody else in this forum had gray blocks in a very different situation (I don't even comprehend that other situation) and they were advised to ignore them, they won't show up on the printed page, but that other person didn't say that the cursor wouldn't go naturally through them as happens with my gray blocks, slowing down the work.

What am I dealing with here, and do you know of a cure? I"m a writer, not a computer techie. Please phrase your answer in a way suitable to my ignorance. Thank you.

[Hagar Delest]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Could it be the same: [Solved] Can't see anything?

If not, please upload a sample file (see How to attach a document here).

Please add '[Solved]' at the beginning of your first post title (edit button) if your issue has been fixed.

[Dreamdeer]

I'm afraid that's not it. I don't have any tables in this document. It's a dream journal. I do have some parts numbered (as when I've had 3 dreams in one night)--do you suppose it might be misinterpreting that as a table? But it also happens in other documents, too, where the only thing numbered is chapters in a way that I don't think any computer would interpret as a table. Or would dates trigger it? I have dates both in the dream journal and in the novels.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that they also seem associated with trouble saving. The computer will try to save the work for hours until I finally give up and leave my corrections unsaved.

This has become quite a problem for me. I base my writing on dreams, and there's some valuable dream notes in there that I need to use--I've come to that part of a story.

Anyway, I will attempt to upload the document, as instructed:

[Hagar Delest]

This is a field but not don't know what it is exactly. Some remaining formatting.

I think the file can be fixed by deleting the tags but it will be some work. Here is the problem (seems to be a protected field in the document):

Code: Select all

<text:p text:style-name="P2">Casanova 's Revolution <field:fieldmark-start/></text:p>
<text:p text:style-name="P2">
   <field:fieldmark-start/>
   <field:fieldmark-start/>
</text:p>
   <text:p text:style-name="P3">
   <text:s text:c="5"/>A warm, loving man, resembling Peter 
   <text:bookmark text:name="Unknown4"/><field:fieldmark-end/>

[Dreamdeer]

Thank you. How do you get to the code? WordPerfect had a toggle for showing the code on a document, but I can't find any such on Open Office. I'm delighted to learn that there's a way to do it after all! Please teach me.

[Hagar Delest]

In fact, the ODF, native file format for OOo is a mere zip file containing human readable files in XML, so you can do a lot of things with your files.

Make a copy of the file, rename it to .zip and extract the content.xml file. Open it with XML Copy Editor for example (free software). After some tests, it seems that the problem is with the field:fieldmark tags:

Content.png (7.14 KiB) Viewed 3092 times

At the end of line 51, remove the <field:fieldmark-start/> tag (don't remove the </text:p> tag), remove lines 52 to 55 and in line 56, remove the <field:fieldmark-end/> tag.
Save the file and put it back in the zip. Rename the zip and you're done.

So in your real file, you've to search for all the <field:fieldmark-xxx/> tags and just remove them. Hit F2 while in XML Copy Editor each time you've removed a pair of start/end tags to check that the XML structure is still fine. Hit F11 to get the XML formatted in multiple lines (by default it comes on 2 lines).

Please add '[Solved]' at beginning of your first post title (edit button) if your issue has been fixed.

[Dreamdeer]

Okay, I think I'm adding [solved] to the first one, but I'm not sure.

[Dreamdeer]

Nope, got it the second time, though. Now I will try to apply the advice.