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...

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...

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 ...

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. In LibreOffice: Create a LibreOffice Writer document. Format the document using Styles, using Headings (1,2,3,4 etc) for TOC levels (example: Heading 1 for Chapter name; Heading 2 for Chapter Subtopic; and so forth). Insert a Table of Contents into the document (Insert, Table of Contents and Index) “Create From” “Additional Styles” Select the Heading levels you used in your document (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading etc.).  Select only as many levels as you want to see in your TOC. To Create a PDF in LibreOffice File, Export to PDF Choose “Archival” and “Export Outlines” (in addition to other Default settings). To Create an epub from a LibreOffice Writer file DON’T USE THE LIBREOFFICE FUNCTION (File, Export to Epub) if you want to create an epub that includes a TOC with...

Rarely do I give Microsoft credit for anything, nor do I recommend that you touch much of anything that they produce. Occasionally, though, even a diehard Linux user like me must give credit where credit is due. And credit is due to Microsoft for their very good Snipping Tool, which goes from very good to amazing when paired with Power Tools. Let me back up here and say that I am running Windows 11 (technically, my wife has a Windows machine and I borrow it only for small things like using Snipping Tool or Adobe Digital Editions.) Use-case scenario: When I was still working in the corporate world, many of my jobs required me or someone on my staff to convert a graphic pdf file to a searchable text file. Adobe Acrobat or one of its equally-expensive competitors was about the only way to accomplish the task. Today I am going to show you how to do the same conversion from a graphics file to a searchable text file, using only the Microsoft Snipping Tool (and, of course, some text-base pro...

Microsoft Word has a built-in Style Separator function that allows the user to mix two different styles in the same paragraph; LibreOffice, as of the date of this post, does not have the same capability. Below is a comment I appended to the bug number referenced in the subject line of this post. I'm sure I will be kicked out of the forum…again.  If you don't care to read a snarky vs. snarky post, here is the summary: First, LibreOffice Writer does not have a Style Separator function and the Document Foundation does not (at this time) intend to develop one. Second, the alternatives suggested by the devs and by users in the forum are clever but worthless to the serious user. "This is an ongoing issue that has been reported in at least two separate bug reports and the developers have responded, once with "there are ways to accomplish this without developing an actual style separator" (my description) and, in this bug report, "Looks like this is a bit of an obsc...

Disclaimer : Don't worry: Removing your current version won't mess with your LO files or with your LO settings (dictionary, autocorrect, etc.). On the other hand, people can do some pretty weird stuff that nobody told them to do, thus we deny liability and culpability for anything that goes wrong in your attempt to follow these instructions, no matter if you follow them exactly or if you get creative and leave the beaten path. So, here goes. I have my reasons for not wanting to use the Snap version of LibreOffice. So here is how I keep my LO up-to-date without having to resort to the Snap version. (This is a much quicker process than it appears, usually fewer than ten minutes). Why do it this way? First, I don't want the Snap version of LibreOffice. While I do have both Snap and Flatpak versions of various programs installed on my computer, and without going into a lengthy discussion of why I don't want to use the Snap version of LO, suffice it to say that I don't t...

In LibreOffice Writer, there is an option for defining how much space a footnote can occupy on a page…but it is an option in theory only. In actuality, the function is quirky and The Document Foundation has, to my knowledge, never come up with a reason for the problem, not to mention a fix for it. The scenario (see images above) Let's say that you have a fairly long document and you want your footnotes to be numbered consecutively for the entire document, and you want your footnotes to appear at the end of each page. So far, so good. You have discovered how to make that happen by going to Tools, Footnotes and Endnotes, and doing the set-up there. But how do you make sure that your footnotes do not break across pages? Do this: Click on Format, Page Style, Footnote. In "Footnote Area" click on "Not Larger Than Page Area," then click on Okay. The problem Following the instruction above works under special circumstances only, which are defined on the LibreOffice Hel...

First let me give you a straight answer, unlike the (nonsense)-answer you will find on the LibreOffice Online Help pages.  Here is the original question as found on the LO Help Pages site 6 years ago (it appears that nothing has changed and nothing has been done about this "closed" issue since 2015). How to change background color of comment(ctrl+alt+c) & is there any other feature like comment that can be hide-unhide “on click”? I found in options, it allows to change the bright yellow color of notes in Spreadsheet. Which option do i use to change bright yellow color of comment in Impress? Straight-forward Answer :  Changing the background color of comment boxes in Writer and Impress cannot be done. Period.  Forget about all the LO Help replies that explain how each user of a shared document is assigned a different color for his/her comments; that has nothing to do with the simple question as originally stated. And  the suggestion that frames can be used to ma...

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 care to read the background information and just want to skip straight to the solution, scroll down to the stuff with the yellow highlighting. Background : I convert a  lot of public domain books to text, edit them, add commentary, then convert them back to e-Book formats for reading on my computer, smartphone and other devices. I have a Google Pixel phone and am heavily invested in Google Play Books, so it is to my advantage to upload my converted and newly-created .epub and .pdf books to Google Play Books, for reading on my phone. The Problem: I completely ditched all things Microsoft several years ago. LibreOffice Writer is the only product I use for word processing, as it is far superior not only to other Linux offerings, it is way better than M...

UPDATE : (10-30-2022) The method described under "CASE" below works with the older "Ubuntu Tweaks" but not the newer "Gnome Tweaks." Fortunately, you can accomplish the same objective by going to (System) Settings / Keyboard and in the "Compose Key" box select the key you want to use to invoke the typing of Special Characters. In my own case, I selected the Right-Alt key as I rarely used it for anything else. Now, if I want to enter a long-dash, for instance, I tap the right-alt key, followed by tapping the dash sign on the keyboard three times. A long dash — is entered, as opposed to the ugly three dashes --- you get if you don't use the Compose Key method.  The table below remains valid for this updated method. Once you get used to typing the correct key combinations, which is mainly an intuitive task, it is easy to enter all those special characters you occasionally need to use. ### (We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find help...

(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 with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the yellow highlighted section for the problem and the fix.) I ditched Microsoft OS completely and forever and installed Ubuntu Linux on all my machines roughly eight years ago. During that time, I have installed every upgrade, which amounts to somewhere around sixteen, if you include version 21.04. I never had even a minor glitch on any of my machines until the very recent 21.04 upgrade attempted on an older Fujitsu laptop. Before you jump to any conclusions, not I did not try to force the upgrade by using the terminal. I waited for the "official" upgrade to show up in Software Updater, which happened only today because of some problem that occurred on someone...