Sometimes you just have to start over with a document (OpenOffice Writer)

I've been doing some consulting, putting together documents in a nice neat organized master document. However, some of the features weren't working--I was having trouble overriding the pagination of the headings at the beginning of each new subdocument, for instance.

Then I talked to my contact with the client and he said that the document had originally been created in the early 90s, in WordPerfect 5, on UNIX. It's nearly 20 years old and has been through at least three major document type conversions and three different operating systems. Not to mention all the different versions of WordPerfect.

This can take a toll on a document.

So I am taking the content, copying it, creating a new empty text document, and doing a special paste as unformatted text into the new document to nuke away all the vestigial formatting of the last two decades, and re-applying the formatting.

(Edit > Paste Special, and choose Unformatted Text.)

When you have an old document that's been through so much, it's not OpenOffice, it's the gunk that the document is dragging along with it. Once I did the paste special, all the formatting worked exactly as it's supposed to.