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File name and file path limitations in Windows and OneDrive. Use LibreOffice, Google Drive, and Linux OS Instead.

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 do a lot of research that results in multiple layers of folders, and very long filenames for documents. While both Windows OneDrive and Google Drive have a limit of around 250 characters for file path and file name combined, my personal experience has been that I frequently cannot upload to OneDrive what I consider to be a reasonable number of characters, while I have never had a problem uploading and downloading the exact same file between my Google Drive folders and my Linux machine. The Windows Problem Windows has a flat-out limit of 250 characters combined for file path and file name, when those files are synced to OneDrive. The limit is not only baked into the Windows-to-OneDrive code, it seems to be baked into the Windows OS itself. Which means that your Offi...
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Drop Cap Glitch in Writer, First Letter Does Not Render Correctly

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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. The Issue I convert a lot of public domain books from pdf to Writer then back to PDF. Lately I changed my Default font choice to Noto Serif. All was fine until I decided that for one series of books I wanted to use Drop Cap on the first paragraph of each new chapter. Everything was working smoothly until the first word of a Drop Cap paragraph started with the letter J . Drop Cap rendered the letter J as below (1st pic). The Diagnosis It did not take long to figure this one out. As I had just recently made Noto Serif my font of choice, it occurred to me that changing the font family might cure my problem. I changed the characters in the first word of my Drop Cap paragraph from Noto Serif to IBM Plex Serif and Voila!, the character looked like the second pic below.:  ...
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Converting a Book Cover Image to a Thumbnail Image

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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: I convert a lot of public domain books to other formats, and I also use the content in one of my several Substack pages. This post pertains to the latter. When I write on Substack, frequently I want to use a thumbnail image of the book I am referring to. Sometimes those thumbnails are available at archive.org, but frequently they are not. When they are not available as a thumbnail, below is my solution. Though it looks complicated, it only takes a few minutes once you get the hang of it. How To: This is an example of a thumbnail image created from the cover page of a cook book. Dink around with the resizing instructions if you want a more clear image; this is intended to be thumbnail size.  In Archive.org, click on “Show All” to see more file download choic...
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When your text refuses to be changed into columns

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. The issue In many years of using LibreOffice Writer, I never had any problem when I selected text then selected Format, Columns, Number of Columns, OK. Until today, it just worked automatically. But today when I want through the column-formatting sequence as described, then hit the OK button, the text was not changed...at least not to the naked eye. Four lines of text as illustrated below, remained four lines of text. Line 1 Line 2 Line 3 Line 4 Should be: Line 1          Line 3 Line 2          Line 4 The Solution I won't go through everything I did to try to make things work again as they always had worked. In short, I finally resorted to asking myself what, if anything, was wrong with that particular text. Was it because...
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Inline Styles Have Arrived in LibreOffice 25.n

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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 for LibreOffice Writer 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 new features of Writer, especially for advanced or power users in the Business sector, but also for a wide range of other document (books, articles, instruction manuals, etc.) creators. System Ubuntu 25.04.2 LTS App LibreOffice 25.2.0.3 and ff. A Slick Inline Styles Trick As I thought about how I have used Microsoft Word's Inline styles in the past, and how I might use Writer's new Inline Styles in my current work, I took into consideration how using Inline Styles (IS) would affect (a) how things looked in Writer's Navigation view, (b) How they would app...
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Connect single word in a paragraph to preceding and following paragraphs, using AltSearch in LibreOffice Writer

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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 ...
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LibreOffice : Stop Breaking Your "Document Hyperlinks" (Document Links)

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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...
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