Luke's LibreOffice Hacks

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...

 Okay, so that's a really long title for a blog post, but sometimes you must use many words to explain what it really is that you are doing, a lesson learned by spending a lot of time on the mostly worthless forums where people have very little ability to form a subject line that has anything to do with their issue.  At any rate, some background. I love downloading public-domain (mostly) books and documents, but often they are scanned as image files. As I am a writer and want to use quotes from the pdf, it is much easier if I convert the picture pdf to a text pdf so I can copy and paste, rather than re-typing the  quoted material.  There are lots of ways to go about this conversion task, but often they require buying conversion software or paying to play in the cloud. I hate spending money on work stuff, so here's my simple, quick solution.  Install gscan2pdf. In Ubuntu, you can do that from the Ubuntu Software Centre or the Gnome Software Center. If you are int...