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. 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. What's the Big Deal? For years, I and others have lobbied TDF to add Inline Styles to Writer, a feature that long has been available in Microsoft Word. Why this feature? In my case, it was because I worked with a lot of legacy contracts and other legal documents that needed to be revised and updated. It was important that the structure of the new document should look exactly like the structure of the old document, which meant in many cases that the header for a paragraph should be on the same line as the first line in the paragraph. I also do a lot of conversions of public domain books to LO Writer format, and had the same problem of not being able to match the original text and Table of Contents because I could not mix styles in the same line or paragraph. Examp...

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...

 It seems like a lot of people struggle with this task that should be fairly simple. Let's solve it. Problem : In LibreOffice Writer, the numbers in your numbered list are not bold, and you cannot figure out how to make them bold. You created a numbered list, but the list numbers are not bold. You tried all sorts of ways to make the number bold, with no luck. That's because there is a simple, but somewhat obscure way to make the numbers bold in LO Writer. Once you learn it, you won't forget. Numbered list, but list number itself is not bold Solution :  After you have created your numbered list, right-click in the first numbered paragraph. Select "Bullets and Numbering," then "Bullets and Numbering" again in the drop-down. In the "Bullets and Numbering" dialog box that pops up, select the "Customize" tab. Click on the "Character Style" drop-down box and select "Strong Emphasis," then click okay. Numbered list, list ...