Help Needed on Printing Problem

I need someone more tech savvy and more business savvy to help me figure something out. I'm appealing to my reading audience for help. I'm not sure if all the details below are necessary, but since I don't know which ones are necessary, I'll try to include what I recall.

Yesterday I said here that there were some unfortunate printing glitches in the booklet published by our composition class. I did not name the printer, but it was a well-known office supply store with a printing shop--part of a chain. We paid $275.00 for the printing.

This morning, when Stephen was here to get a few things for finishing setting up the sales displays, he saw a sheaf of clipped-together papers with the booklet cover on top. "What's that?" he asked.

"It's the booklet--what I printed out at school before we got the copies back from _________." (I had done this just in case something terrible happened with the electronic copy.) Then something clicked for me--something I had never thought of in the hulabaloo of getting things done yesterday. "Hey, let's look at that and see if the numbering is right on that copy." It was. Perfect. The perfect copy was printed directly from my thumb drive--the same file I had emailed the printer. I had not changed anything on that file after I got to school except adding leader lines on one line in the Table of Contents. I suddenly felt vindicated and wanted all the students to know that WE had done our part in getting this right. The picture of the cutter barge in Stephen's "Farm" section was there too--perfect.

I had emailed the print shop the files from home before they opened in the morning. Then I called after they opened and talked to someone in the copy shop to see if the file could be read, etc. __________ affirmed that it looked good. It was in OpenOffice format--the only word processing program the students have access to on the school's computers.

The students had saved their documents in a folder called Composition 2011 on the school's server. They were formatted in their final form but still needed some editing. (The document format called for landscape orientation, two columns, a one-inch trough in the middle, and 1/2 inch margins otherwise.)

I saved the Composition 2011 folder to my thumb drive and brought it home to work on here. That evening, I made some editing changes on the individual files. After all the editing changes were made I copied the individual files to a new one called Rural Roots--the title of the booklet. The Table of Contents had been formatted also--by a student, so I followed the "story" order on the Table of Contents in transferring the individual files to the Rural Roots folder.

After everything was in one file (the Rural Roots one) I started at the beginning and added page numbers to the bottom of each column. (Each column was to be a page in the assembled booklet.) This necessitated making some more changes because I needed to move the bottom line of text so that I had a blank line for entering the number. I kept shoving lines out ahead of me--to the next column or page--as I went, making sure to not leave orphan lines at the bottom of each page. Automated numbering did not work because if I had added a footer to contain the number, it would have spanned both columns, with a number precisely in the middle--right where the booklet fold was happening.

I checked and double-checked the page numbering to make sure they were still all properly aligned after I had entered the "indexed" page numbers on the Table of Contents page--something that had not been possible till I had actually entered the numbers in the Rural Roots document. Previous to this I had added several other pages--an introduction, an inside title page also listing the student authors, and two section title pages between several of the stories. I started the numbering after those pages were in place in the Rural Roots document. Those front pages were not included in the numbering sequence.

Two students picked up the copies from the printer and came back disappointed because of the problems they had discovered. They talked to the copy shop person on duty about what they saw, and he said " ___________ printed them just the way 'she' (referring to me) sent them in." I figured it was, in fact, a result of my not having caught a little change that happened at the beginning of the document before I sent it in--which would have knocked all the number alignments off by one or more lines. Discovery of the "perfect" copy makes me wonder. . . . Did the copy shop worker do what I blamed myself for doing--making a small, unnoticed change at the beginning of the document, throwing off the alignment?

I have several questions:

Could different versions of OpenOffice account for the differences in my printed version and theirs?

Is it reasonable to pursue getting any compensation from them for what looks like their mess-up?

How can we avoid this happening in the future?