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. 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...

Our Standard Cautionary Tale on Forums There is a lot of useless junk in forums that purport to tell you how to fix the memory issues in LibreOffice. Most of them are useless because many of the fixes are based on old, outdated versions of LO, say, for instance, version 5.0 or lower. They are also useless because there is always a lot of speculation and guessing taking up space in a forum.  The fixes below cut through the useless junk, and they simply work. We assume that you are on an updated version of LO, such as 6.5 or higher, thus many of the improvements to memory settings are already baked into LO.  Skip the Details For those who don't need all the "what's" and "why's," skip to the highlighted fixes for items 5 and 6 below. Background In earlier versions (see above) of LibreOffice (nee, OpenOffice), memory settings caused the program to react slowly or not at all, depending on the task you were executing. Most of those freezes and crashes had to d...