Gary, thanks for the advice about which version to use.
Utnic, I was struggling with an earlier downloading of 1.4.6 — to the point of the program shutting down with #11 crashed every time I tried to do anything with it — even a few minutes. This gives me the impression that these crashes are accumulative. So, when I downloaded anew I started over with this project. I'm sure it is wise to do that again. This could explain why it happens every time on my computer and not yours. Most of the text is in Georgia, it seems wise to delete any font of Georgia and download from a source known to be good. I may go the extra caution of choosing another font to replace it for the book.
However, I have new information. The odt that I downloaded apparently still contains some corruption from the PDF-OCR process. Some was obviously there at the time, some words simply did not look right. I thought I got rid of it, Acrobat's Preflight gave them a green light — but evidently not. I was able to try Datanumen's Word Repair (in my old PC that works only occasionally) on the odt document that produced the crash today. It says it is corrupted and unable to repair it. Why my computer is more susceptible to this corruption than yours? Probably something to do with corrupted fonts on mine (that Font Book's verification can't detect). It seems best to simply do a clean download of High Sierra and keep any previously constructed odt's and PDF's and Word docs off.
I've changed the fonts in the document and will try it again in Datanumen, if the PC comes back (it's currently back in black screen and starting up in safe mode doesn't work).