Luke's LibreOffice Hacks

We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As of this post, Inline Styles are still very new and, as TDF points out in their features section, still a work in progress. Overall, IMO this is one of the best and most important features of Writer, especially for advanced or power users in the Business sector, but also for a wide range of other documents (books, articles, instruction manuals, etc.) System Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS App LibreOffice 25.2.0.3 The Issue As Inline Styles are so new, I hate to use the word "issue," but none other comes to mind. The issue here is that, when creating an Inline Style the Frame that is created is too large, i.e., there is unwanted space to the right of the last character in the frame. The end result is that the sentence looks clunky and unprofessional. Clients who receiv...

We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. What's the Big Deal? For years, I and others have lobbied TDF to add Inline Styles to Writer, a feature that long has been available in Microsoft Word. Why this feature? In my case, it was because I worked with a lot of legacy contracts and other legal documents that needed to be revised and updated. It was important that the structure of the new document should look exactly like the structure of the old document, which meant in many cases that the header for a paragraph should be on the same line as the first line in the paragraph. I also do a lot of conversions of public domain books to LO Writer format, and had the same problem of not being able to match the original text and Table of Contents because I could not mix styles in the same line or paragraph. Examp...

Let me say first that this will likely be a hack that most of you will never need, but for those who do need it, it's a godsend.  Background I convert a LOT of public domain books from their original formats (pdf, epub, txt, etc.) into cleaned-up, easy-to-read and easy-to-use formats, mostly into .odt files. One of the sources of those Public Domain files is Early English Books online . This fix is predicated on EEBO as the source material, but anyone who uses any method of converting text from one format to another might have a need for this fix. Notice The fix is predicated on (1) the use of LibreOffice Writer, and (2) the installation of of the LibreOffice add-in "Alternate Search and Replace" ( AltSearch ).  The Issue Unfortunately, when I search for a book on EEBO, then choose to copy "All Text" and paste it into a new LibreOffice Writer (.odt) document, most likely the word for which I searched in EEBO, in this case "God," is left hanging out in ...

We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. Scenario You have a single document that references important sections of several other documents. You want to be able to move swiftly between the single document and all the reference documents. To do that, you might use a Document Link in Writer (for instance) : Highlight the word(s), sentence or paragraph in the source document that you want to link to the reference document. Click on the Link icon in the Writer Menu Bar. Search for, Select and Open the document to which you wish to connect. The hyperlink will appear in the Link field of the Hyperlink dialog box. (Optionally, and assuming the reference document contains bookmarks, you can search for those in the next field and get a very targeted location later when you click on the link). Right-click somewhere in...

We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As always, if you don't want to be bored by the Scenario, simply jump to the Instructions portion below. Scenario: I download a ton of public domain books and other publications that I use for research and republication. Though I try to be disciplined and meticulous in categorizing the downloads into numerous folders and sub-folders, with more than 10,000 files I find myself doing a lot of searches for certain words or phrases in certain files within certain folders. Here's an illustrative example. I have a single word I am looking for because it has been, for 75 years, a hot topic in general public discourse (let's say, so as not to offend anyone, the word is :"blooper.") Then I want to export or copy and paste the search results (list of files...

We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. I was converting and modernizing an old text in which the reversed text of a passage was printed, as an example of how difficult it is for our minds to contend with things that don't fit with our habits.Being too lazy to read and/or type all the words back into their original or "normal" front-to-back sequence, I started a web search for a solution. Like so many others who need help on this kind of problem, I wasn't even sure what words or phrases to use in my search. Rest assured, though, I used a plethora of related words and phrases. Of course, most of the search results took me to the generally useless User Forums, where I went through dozens of threads that were (a) closed to further comments; (b) full of comments from people who obviously did ...