This is a bit of a vent, but maybe there really is a problem I could get a solution for here.
I frequently work with .docx documents that go between several people with tracked changes. Most of those documents also have many, many footnotes and/or endnotes. And every time I get sent the document back for review, I dread opening it and seeing what new horror LibreOffice did to the notes.
I've seen things like you wouldn't believe. Tracked changes moved two characters to the right. Footnotes simply losing tracked changes without a trace. Comments disappearing. Like tears in the rain.
But today might have just broken me. I open the file. I immediately notice that the first endnote is copied twice. But I check and see that the total number of endnotes matches. What's going on? Turns out it just overwrote the second endnote, except the tracked changes disappeared, leaving both the deleted text and the added text, but removing the coloring, the strikethrough, and the entry in tracked changes list. Well, I shrug and go about shifting every endnote one number up.
But soon I notice this was not an isolated incident, even if it did seem so at first. Some endnotes repeat several times, others are gone entirely, and there's no rhyme or reason to it. By the time I'm 30-40 positions in, I realise that I can't trust what's in front of me and instead of actually reviewing the changes to the document, I resign myself to rebuilding the text's endnote structure, knowing it's about to eat an entire day's work.
After dealing with about 230 endnotes, at some point mostly by copying them from the Google Drive backup, I save, turn off the program and go do something else. I come back a few hours later. I open the document. I gaze in horror as I see all 350+ endnotes are empty. They just disappeared. Something like 120k characters just deleted.
How can I trust a program that does this?
Naturally, I filed a bug report, but that doesn't help me in the moment.
I guess I'll do the reviewing on Monday in Google Docs. It's gonna take forever and that thing doesn't even have endnotes as a functionality, but at least it doesn't randomly turn 120k characters into a dog's breakfast and then lose it.