Luke's LibreOffice Hacks

Scenario: Your downloaded .txt or converted .pdf file has a paragraph break after each line, but you want a paragraph break only at the actual or "real" end of the paragraph. Here's how you take care of that in three easy steps in LibreOffice Writer. Perennial Reminder: Depending on the length of the document, some Find and Replace tasks can take a long while. Take a break and let your F&R do its thing, sometimes as long as five or ten minutes. Be patient. Go to your browser and post something on Facebook or Twitter. Go to the kitchen and make a sandwich. Most Replacements are pretty quick.  First , you should replace the actual or "real" end of each paragraph with a placeholder; the reason will become obvious later in these instructions. So here, we are replacing each instance of the "real" paragraph end (highlighted) with ".9999". Later, we will replace all instances of 9999. Below is the find and replace instruction: ( note that  the...

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. If you don't want to read all the intro stuff, skip to the section in yellow below and heed those instructions only. Scenario I do a lot of conversions of public domain books from pdf to .odt formats. In doing so, I am working from .txt versions of the books to convert them to .odt versions. That process requires me to do a ton of clean-up to the .odt files, including massive Find and Replace tasks. For example, the file will be full of multiple repeating spaces between words, where there should be only one space. To accomplish that task, I search for (space, space) and replace it with (space). And herein lies the rub: when doing this in a 600-page document, there can be upwards of 100,000 replacements. Naturally, it takes a long time to do all those replacement...

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...

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.:  ...

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...