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. 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...

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...

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...

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...