Purging an Openoffice document from ghost styles

published Mar 14, 2011 08:48 by admin ( last modified Mar 14, 2011 08:48 )

Summary: Save in .fodt format and search and replace the style name, using your favorite text editor or text processing utility

So, tomorrow it is time to give a course again, and when it was time to print out the 100 page + documentation today, it turns out that the Openoffice installed on my Ubuntu 10.10 cannot properly read the Opeoffice document I have previously edited on a slightly older Ubuntu.

Most text paragraphs simply had the format "Textformatvorlage", which besides sticking out as German in my English environment, is nowhere to be found in the styles palette or in the search and replace dialog. So now I have hundreds of paragraphs I will need to reformat by hand. Preferrably in under ten minutes.

The solution turned out to be to save the document in a pure text format (.odt was binary on my machine) and then search for "Textformatvorlage" and replace it with another style name, "Text_20_body" in my case, throughout the document. The format I saved the document in is ".fodt" .