Luke's LibreOffice Hacks

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...

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 Most of them are useless because many of the fixes are based on old, outdated versions of LO, say, for instance, version 5.0 or lower.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...

 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...

The first passage below shows text copied and pasted "without formatting" into a new document. Note that some words break at the end of the sentence, but without hyphenation. Note also that the type is not justified, even though the paragraph style is fully justified. If you try to fix this the easy, normal way you might find that it cannot be done. I'm not going to go into detail to explain everything that won't work; instead I will just jump to a fix that does work. This fix involved the use of the LibreOffice add-on, "Advanced Find and Replace." Click the link to install it, then save your work, close LO and then re-open it. Now you will see the Advanced Find and Replace icon in the menu bar. --Frustrating, wrongly-formatted text after copy and paste. (Be sure to select the text you want to correct before you do the Find and Replace).  After you install the add-on, click the icon to launch "Alternative Find & Replace." Then make it look li...

Finding this in the Toolbar is not at all intuitive, so here's how you can change the size and thickness of that little bar that separates a footnote from normal text on a page. Select Format, Page Style, Footnote, then make any desired changes in the dialog box that pops up and click "OK". That's it. You're done.