Luke's LibreOffice Hacks

Here at Luke's LO Hacks we love Okular , a free, open-source pdf program that is one of our main companion programs to LibreOffice Writer. It's great, but not perfect, which means from time to time we find either a glitch or have a suggestion for an improvement. In truth, glitches are few, but one significant glitch we discovered was the loss of bookmarks after renaming a pdf file that we bookmarked. Here's the sequence : Open pdf. Add bookmarks (in this case, quite a few). Save the file and close it. In Nautilus (file folders program for Ubuntu Linux), rename the file to append the word "Bookmarked." Re-open the file. Result : Bookmarks disappeared, had to re-bookmark everything. Bug Report : A bug report was submitted (Okular version 1.10.0).  WHAT YOU SHOULD DO: If you have experienced the same problem, make sure you re-name your file BEFORE adding bookmarks; and once you have added bookmarks, don't change the file name unless you don't mind re-bookmark...

The first passage below shows text copied and pasted "without formatting" into a new document. Note that some words break at the end of the sentence, but without hyphenation. Note also that the type is not justified, even though the paragraph style is fully justified. If you try to fix this the easy, normal way you might find that it cannot be done. I'm not going to go into detail to explain everything that won't work; instead I will just jump to a fix that does work. This fix involved the use of the LibreOffice add-on, "Advanced Find and Replace." Click the link to install it, then save your work, close LO and then re-open it. Now you will see the Advanced Find and Replace icon in the menu bar. --Frustrating, wrongly-formatted text after copy and paste. (Be sure to select the text you want to correct before you do the Find and Replace).  After you install the add-on, click the icon to launch "Alternative Find & Replace." Then make it look li...

Finding this in the Toolbar is not at all intuitive, so here's how you can change the size and thickness of that little bar that separates a footnote from normal text on a page. Select Format, Page Style, Footnote, then make any desired changes in the dialog box that pops up and click "OK". That's it. You're done.