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...

 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...

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...