I'm copying straight out of LibreOffice Writer. Just Ctrl-C -> Ctrl-V. And yeah, I save in ODT. And it doesn't seem to matter what way I paste the text, it ends up being the same result. IE, no tabs, all lines are double spaced, etc. I'm using Firefox on Linux if that matters. Also, I did some experimenting and I can successfully post the doc in some locations with a simply copy/paste with all the needed tabs, italics, etc, so I don't think it's an OpenOffice issue. It feels like the text editor itself is incompatible with the way the text comes over. I don't know. What do you guys think?
Edit:
Interesting. I did some experimenting with Docx, but no change. Then I converted to PDF. No change. Then I tried HTML and...it did the thing in that doc that it's doing in the text box on the chapter page. So it sounds like it might be a Libre Office on Linux thing. Let me fiddle with this as I might be able to MacGyver a solution now that I have an idea what's happening.
Edit 2:
Okay, found a solution. It's a bit hacky, but it seems to work. Anyhow, the solution, if anyone else needs to do this is...
1. Save file as html, then open in a text editor.
2. Replace all "<p style" with "<div style"
3. Replace all the "</p>" tags with "</div>"
4. Append the "background: transparent">" part of the tag with " " to look something like this: 'background: transparent" > ' <- That will give you a 5 space indent on each line. This needs to be done as a "replace all" so every line is properly grabbed and changed.
5. Save the file, open in your browser, copy->paste into the chapter text box, $profit. :)
Anyhow, again, it's kinda hacky, but it seems to solve the biggest issues I had. :)