is there a list of formatting characters and their meaning in oo writer

It's not very clear to me but I suppose you want to see Tools-->Customize...-->Keyboard.

On Sat, 2009-07-18 at 06:32 +0000, Vihar wrote:

> Your question #77354 on openoffice.org in ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+question/77354
>
> Status: Open => Answered
>
> Vihar proposed the following answer:
> It's not very clear to me but I suppose you want to see
> Tools-->Customize...-->Keyboard.
>

Thanks very much Vihar for your reply, but unfortunately this is not
what I want to know.

I will clarify my problem.

Now and again I create a document which is composed of extracts from
other documents (which, very often, have been created by programs other
than open office). Once I have copied and pasted these extracts into my
document, I proceed to format the document. To help do this I click on
'View' and turn on 'Nonprinting Characters'. However I don't know the
meaning of some of the characters, symbols, lines, and shaded blocks
that appear (and which represent open office's interpretation of the
existing formatting), and so I go about laboriously deleting the
formatting I don't understand, and then reformatting the document as a
whole. I anticipate that the process would be much easier if I knew the
meaning of all the formatting, as I would be able to incorporate some of
it into the final document with full knowledge of what I had done.

Can you please help me???.

Thanking you in anticipation. Bill Beardsmore

Hi!
Rcently I don't create or compose documents so I'm not so familiar with OpenOffice. I used to do it with MS Word so I can tell you my general considerations.

I understand you copy from a document opened by another program and paste to an opened document of OpenOffice. This way you are pasting directly foreign formatting and OpenOffice doesn't or can not process it. I suppose you open those documents, if possible, with OpenOffice and copy and paste between two documents opened by OpenOffice. This way the foreign formatting will be processed or converted to a maximum extent by OpenOffice.
You can look at the option File-->Wizards-->Document Converter and play with Insert-->File to look at the difference with the direct pasting.

I realise I probably tell you common things that you know.
Cheers!