Software I like: LibreOffice/Apache OpenOffice

Writer | Math | Impress | Calc | Draw | Base

LibreOffice was a fork of OpenOffice.org. The latter now exists as Apache OpenOffice. Unfortunately efforts are divided between the two projects. (The original project had to be be referred to as OpenOffice.org, used as an adjective, because the name OpenOffice itself was owned by someone else.)

The native file format is a zip’d collection of files with the main content stored as XML.

A possible alternative to LO/AOO is the Calligra suite, a descendent of KDE’s KOffice. As of 2019 Jun 14, there still is no real integration of Zotero with Calligra Words, but RTF/ODF-Scan for Zotero is a Zotero add-on that provides an awkward work-around (requiring the presence of LO).

Resources

• LibreOffice Documentation, including the latest Writer Guide, Math Guide, etc. See also Documentation/Publications for links to current and past guides and individual chapters.
• Release notes are available for current and older versions, (e.g., 7.1); see also this list of links.
• There are repositories for LO Extensions (292 as of 2016 Feb 6) and AOO Extensions (> 700 as of 2016 Feb 6). Extensions are often but apparently not always compatible between LO and AOO.
• Bugs: LO, AOO
• Designing with LibreOffice by Bruce Byfield: a freely downloadable book (also available in print) that emphasizes the use of styles and templates and the basics of design.
• Taming Apache OpenOffice and Taming LibreOffice by Jean Weber

My notes

Writer

• Automatic backup. Do Tools ► Options ► Load/Save ► General and check the box Always create a backup copy. This is turned off by default.
• Styles. Use styles instead of direct formatting, especially paragraph, character and page styles.
  • To understand the hierarchical arrangement of paragraph styles, in the Styles dialogue window (Styles ► Manage Styles) select Hierarchical in the drop-down menu at the bottom. Every style inherits attributes from the Default Paragraph Style, including the Text Body style and all of its descendents.
  • Use the Text Body paragraph style rather than the parent Default Paragraph Style style. By default the Text Body style will automatically be specified for text following a heading style.
  • For headings use the styles Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. Don’t use the parent Heading style directly, and don’t use direct formatting.
  • If (against all advice) you’re playing with text colour using the font-colour attribute directly, if you want to set the colour back to the default black, set it to Automatic, not to Black. Similarly, to remove a highlight colour, select No Fill rather than setting it to White.
• Vertical and horizontal spacing
  • Do not use strings of Return characters to space down the page in order to start a new page. Instead, insert a manual page break (Insert ► Page Break).
  • Do not use extra Return characters to create blank lines between paragraphs, nor to create double line spacing. Instead, use paragraph-style settings to define the vertical spacing above and below paragraphs, and the desired line spacing.
  • Do not use multiple Space or Tab characters to position things horizontally on the page. There are better alternatives, depending on what you’re trying to do. For example:
    • To position things like the date or signature in a letter, adjust the tab settings.
    • To position an image, right-click on it and use Align Objects or Properties.
    • To indent a paragraph, use the Indent setting in an appropriate paragraph style.
• Numbering
  • Chapter numbering vs. list numbering. Chapter (or outline) numbering is different from list numbering, and the two should not be mixed within a single paragraph. For chapter and section numbering, use Tools ► Chapter Numbering. For list numbering, use Format ► Bullets & Numbering. The bullet and numbering icons that appear in the toolbar by default are for list numbering. Another icon exists for outline numbering and can be made visible by customizing the toolbar.
  • Chapter (outline) numbering
    • The following are instructions for setting up chapter and section numbering for one particular common numbering scheme. The instructions are a confused mixture of chapter numbering and list numbering.
      • In Tools ► Chapter Numbering, under Numbering
        Level 1, set Start at to the chapter number for the first (or only) chapter in your document
        • for each Level (i.e., from 1 to 10 individually) make sure that
          • Paragraph style is set to the corresponding Heading style: level 1 = Heading 1, level 2 = Heading 2, etc.
          • the value of Show sublevels is equal to the level number
      • Set your chapter title to Heading 1 style.
      • Click somewhere in the chapter title and then do Format ► Lists ► No List. (This isn’t necessary if you haven’t already set up some numbering.)
      • Do Format ► Bullets and Numbering.
        • Select the Outline tab and then select the box with 1, 1.1, 1.1.1, etc.
        • Select the Position tab
          Under Level select 1-10
          For Aligned at specify 0.
          For Numbering alignment leave it as Left (I don’t actually know what it does)
          For Numbering followed by select Space
          For Indent at specify 0
        • Select the Customize tab
          Under Level select 1-10
          Under Separator and Before, make sure it’s empty (with no space character)
          Under Separator and After, make sure it’s empty (with no space character)
          Under Level select 1
          Under Separator and Before specify Chapter  (with a space character at the end)
          Under Separator and After specify . (period)
        • Click OK
    • Use of the styles Heading 1, Heading 2 etc. will result in the headings showing up in a table of contents (ToC). To make some other style show up in a ToC, edit the style: in the Outline & List tab, choose which Outline level the style should have in the ToC.
      (There are related settings in Insert ► Table of Contents and Index ► Table of Contents, Index or Bibliography, under Additional styles in the Type tab, and in the Styles tab, but I don’t understand how the whole thing works.)
  • List numbering. See Configure spacing between list elements for a user’s discussion of using the various List and Numbering paragraph styles for bulleted and numbered lists, respectively.
  • Page numbering.
    The sum of the page Bottom Margin, the footer Spacing and the footer Height should equal the distance that you want between the bottom of your main text and the bottom of the page. For example, if your page Bottom Margin was 2 cm before adding a footer, then change it to 0.5 cm and set the footer Spacing and Height to 1 cm and 0.5 cm, respectively.
    
    • To add a page number to a page, enable footers in the appropriate page style for the page. Click within the footer, and do Insert ► Field ► Page Number.
    • To have roman numerals for the first pages in a document, do Styles ► Manage Styles to open the Styles dialogue box, select the Page Styles tab, right-click on Default Page Style and select New. Create a new style called Front Matter. On the Page tab, in the Layout Settings section, for Page numbers select i, ii, iii. Set up a footer for the page style, and click OK to exit from the Page Style dialogue. (Page styles do not inherit attributes from a ‘parent’ style the way paragraph styles do. You will therefore need to ensure that the settings (margins, page number position etc.) are the same in your new style as in the Default Page Style.
    • Large documents often have 3 types of page numbering: no numbering on the first (title) page, Roman numerals for the front matter, and Arabic numerals for the rest. You can set this up as follows:
      • Go to the top of the first page. In the Styles dialogue window, under the Page Styles tab, double-click on First Page.
      • To quote the built-in help, ‘The new page number is an attribute of the first paragraph of the page.’
        Go to the first paragraph (probably a heading, but not the header) on the next page (i.e., the first page of the front matter).
        • Do Format ▶ Paragraph ▶. Go to the TextFlow tab. Under Breaks:
          • Enable Insert and make sure that Type is Page and Position is Before.
          • Enable With Page Style and select the Front Matter style.
          • Enable Page number and make sure its value is 1.
        • Click on OK.
      • Go to the first paragraph (again, probably a heading, but not the header) of the main body of the document (e.g., Chapter 1). Repeat the previous step but selecting the Default Page Style.
      • You may end up with a couple of extra page breaks that need to be deleted.
  • Figure and formula numbering by chapter. If you create separate documents for chapters and then combine them, you may end up with your figures and formulas being all numbered in one sequence rather than restarting from 1 for each chapter. One way (not necessarily the right way) of fixing it for the formulas, for example, is to select the number of the first formula in a chapter and go to Edit ► Fields. In the dialogue box that comes up, change Value from Text + 1 to just 1 and click on OK. Hopefully that formula will now be number 1 and the numbers of the following formulas will be incremented appropriately.
  • Figure and formula numbering out of order. Sometimes figure numbering will get mixed up if you move figures around, so the figures are no longer numbered in the order in which they appear. Doing Tools ► Update ► Fields may correct the numbering. This is sometimes necessary even if Fields is already selected under Automatically Update at Tools ► Options ► LibreOffice Writer ► General.
• Images
  • Captions. To add a figure caption that will stay attached to the figure, first add the figure itself (Insert ► Image), then right-click on the figure and do Insert ► Caption.

    The default sequence names that are offered for numbering are Drawing and Illustration. To add Figure as a possible sequence name, go to Tools ▶ Options ▶ LibreOffice Writer ▶ AutoCaption; highlight one of the items under Add captions automatically when inserting: and make sure its checkbox is checked; under Caption ▶ Category, highlight one of the existing sequence names and replace it with Figure; click on OK. If you don’t really want AutoCaption, go back in and turn it off. These instructions are based on Adding captions to graphics. I’m not actually clear about some of the interactions.

    A caption usually includes a ‘title’ part that concisely states what the figure shows (not a complete sentence), possibly followed by non-sentence descriptions of different panels in the figure and of the meanings of label abbreviations, colours, arrows, etc., possibly followed in turn by explanatory sentences.

    To generate a Table of Figures, do Insert ► Table of Contents and Index ► Table of Contents, Index or Bibliography. There are a number of options in the Type tab. Under Create From, for Display: you will probably want References (or Reference Text in some versions?).

    There does not seem to be a way to follow the common practice of having only the ‘title’ part of each caption included in the Table of Figures (ref). One could select Object names under Create From, and then in the Navigator tool rename the Images, but the names would need to include manually inserted figure numbers.

  • Image positioning. In a large document with many images, image positioning may become difficult to control, and images may even disappear sometimes, seemingly randomly. It is important to understand how images are anchored. Here are some references:
    • Section on ‘Positioning images within the text’ in the chapter on ‘Images and Graphics’ in the Writer Guide.
    • [Tutorial] Some useful hints on using images
    Some highlights:
    • Usually use Anchor to paragraph (or Anchor to character?) and try to keep the image close to its anchor. Usually don’t anchor more than one image to a single anchor.
    • If the image is within a caption frame, use Anchor to frame for the image and then use Anchor to paragraph (or Anchor to character?) for the frame.
    • If an image seems to disappear from within its caption frame, sometimes saving and re-opening the document will be enough to make it reappear. Sometimes, shifting things around may also cause it to reappear.
    • Anchor to page was removed from its old places in the interface at some point (version 7.1?) because many users misunderstood how it worked and there are usually better ways of doing things. Toolbars and context menus can be customized to make it available again. See this bug report for a long and lively discussion of page anchors and of the frustrations of image positioning in general.
  • Image as background. Rather than just inserting an image and doing Arrange ▶ Send to back, use a page style and specify Background As Graphic. For a full-page image, set the Page ▶ Margins and Borders ▶ Spacing to contents to zero.
• Fonts.
  • Typography. See Typography toolbar extension for fancy typographic features (small caps and much more) using the Graphite fonts Linux Libertine G and Linux Biolinum G, but not OpenType fonts. See this old discussion (2015 May 7) of the state of OpenType support in libre software.

    There is a longstanding bug related to handling fonts that have more than the 4 standard styles (regular, bold, italic, and bold italic); see also related e-mail discussion.

  • Font substitution Font substitution is sometimes required because the font being used doesn’t contain a requested glyph. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to determine which font is being used when font substitution is done. One method is to export the document as PDF and then view it with an appropriate PDF viewer/editor. LibreOffice Draw can be used for the purpose. (SumatraPDF can show which fonts are used in a document but not which font is used for a particular character.)

    Under MS Windows, the substitution rules are in c:/Program Files/LibreOffice/share/registry/main.xcd under <node oor:name="FontSubstitutions">. By default, LO seems to use Segoe fonts for substitution.

  • Embedding fonts in PDF files. If you need to have your fonts embedded when exporting in PDF format, do File ► Properties ► Font and check the Embed fonts in the document checkbox.
  • Special characters. Special characters can be inserted using Insert ► Special Character (or the icon ) but it can be tedious to find a particular character. If you know the Unicode value, you can enter it in the Hexadecimal field or the Decimal field within the Special Character dialogue box. You can also directly insert a character into a document by typing the character’s Unicode value (e.g., U+AE, not case-sensitive) and then typing Alt-X. Alt-X can also be used at any time to view the Unicode value of the character before the cursor.

    Autocorrect can be used for inserting special characters.

    See below for information about a custom macro for inserting special characters, and about special characters for formatting.

  • Autocorrect. Some text replacements (e.g., ‘--’ giving ‘–’) are defined by default and can be enables or disabled in Tools ▶ AutoCorrect Options… ▶ Options. To define a text replacement to insert a special character, enter the special character in a document; highlight it; go to Tools ▶ AutoCorrect Options… ▶ Replace, where the special character should already appear in the With field; in the Replace field enter the characters that should generate the special character; click on New.
    Note that it doesn’t work to use, for example, ‘e'’ to enter ‘é’ if the ‘'’ character is converted to a curly quotation mark as specified in Tools ▶ AutoCorrect Options… ▶ Localised Options. In any case, using AutoCorrect for accented characters doesn’t really work well because there needs to be a space character preceding the specified keystrokes (presumably because the feature is designed to autocorrect words). Edit ▶AutoText is another possibility but doesn’t seem to work well either.

    If Autocorrect functions don’t work, make sure the language is set correctly (cf. Autocorrect not working). In one case, I saw that the language for a paragraph was set to [None].

• Replying to own comment. The Reply option isn’t available for your own comment, but with the cursor inside the comment you can do Insert ► Comment to get the same effect.
• Paragraph spacing at top of page. If a paragraph style is defined as having space above it, normally this space is unwanted if the paragraph is at the top of a page. By default, Writer adds the unwanted space at the top of the first page, for compatibility with MS Word. To avoid this, do Tools ► Options ► Writer ► Compatibility and uncheck Add paragraph and table spacing at tops of pages (in current document).
• Selecting large amounts of text. To easily select a large amount of text that spans page breaks, use the quick-select feature: position the cursor by clicking at one end of the text to be selected, then scroll to the other end of the text to be selected and press Shift before clicking to reposition the cursor. The entire area between the first cursor position and the second cursor will be selected. (I don’t know where this is documented, I found it in an unrelated posting somewhere.)
  Alternatively, use the Extended Selection mode: position the cursor by clicking at one end of the text to be selected, then press F8 to enter extended-selection mode (STD becomes EXT in the status bar), then scroll to the other end of the text to be selected and click to reposition the cursor; press F8 again to get back to the standard selection mode, otherwise selection doesn’t seem to work at all. (This use of the F8 key for selection works differently than what I remember from WordPerfect.) One can also switch into extended-selection mode by clicking on STD in the status bar.
• Occasional copy-paste problem. Occasionally, in MS Windows, copying and then pasting into a Writer document will cause a previous clipboard entry to be pasted. One fix seems to be to click somewhere and copy nothing, and then do the desired copy and paste again (ref).
• Document comparison. When document A is open and then Edit ▶ Compare Document is used to compare it with document B, the changes are recorded with the assumption that document B is the older version. That is, text in A is shown as inserted and text from B is shown as deleted.
• Customizing menus. Do Tools ► Customise and select Menus tab. To add a submenu to a menu, use the Target dropdown list to select the menu to which you want to add the submenu, then click on the Insert button and select Insert Sub-menu. In the pop-up dialogue, specify the name for the new submenu. To then add items to the submenu, you must select it from the Target dropdown list; if it doesn’t appear there, you may need to exit from the Customise dialogue and then enter it again. If you want to add functions defined in a macro, click on the Category dropdown list and select Macros (near the bottom).
• Custom icons. Here are icons that I created for Edit ► Changes ► Record and Edit ► Changes ► Accept or Reject … because at one time none were provided. To install such icons, use the Import function as described under Choosing icons for toolbar commands in the chapter on ‘Customizing Writer’ in the Writer Guide.
• Endnotes. To put endnotes elsewhere than at the very end of a document, search for, e.g., ‘endnotes placement’ at OpenOffice.org Knowledgebase (Answer #383); key is to use sections.
• Offline help. In LibreOffice, Help ► LibreOffice Help leads to on-line help by default. An optional download is offered for off-line help. For it to work, make sure that the user-interface language (Tools ► Language Settings ► Languages ► User interface) matches the language of the downloaded off-line help. In my case at least, the default user-interface language was English (USA) but the help-package language was English (UK).
• Expert Configuration. As of version 4.2, LO has an Expert Configuration button in the dialogue box at Tools ► Options ► LibreOffice ► Advanced (ref). The button leads to a window with thousands of editable items, with a search feature as of LO 5.0. I don’t know where or if they’re documented. The only ones whose functions I know are:
  • the Preview property of /org.openoffice.Office.Common/StylesAndFormatting – changing it from true to false (by double-clicking, or by clicking on Edit) turns off the new-fangled space-gobbling previewing of styles (ref). This applies to the Styles dialogue box (Styles ► Manage Styles) and not to the Set Paragraph Style drop-down menu in the Formatting toolbar.
  • the UseSystemFileDialog property of /org.openoffice.Office.Common/Misc – select between the operating system’s dialog style or LO’s built-in dialog style for file opening and saving. (This used to be available directly under Tools ► Options ► LibreOffice ► General. There seems to be a move away from having a built-in dialog style.)
• Insert text before table at start of document If a document is created that starts with a table, it will then appear impossible to position the cursor so as to add text before that table. The trick is to put the cursor at the beginning of the top-left cell and press Enter (e.g., ref). For some reason this inserts an empty paragraph before the table rather than in the cell. Use of Alt-Enter will also work, and is required for entering text before a section. See Shortcut Keys for LibreOffice Writer.
• Experimental features. In LO some features are labelled as ‘experimental’. In LO 3 they can be enabled in Tools ▶ Options ▶ LibreOffice ▶ General. Starting with LO 4 they can be enabled in Tools ► Options ► LibreOffice ► Advanced, and there is also a setting to enable limited macro recording. To find out what such features exist, in a posting on 2011 Sep 12 it was suggested that one could search the code for IsExperimentalMode. As of 2020 Oct 24, for LO 7.0, the search yields things related to Basic IDE options; database migration and the Firebird database engine; the notebook bar; XML export; jumbo sheets[?]; the template manager; file versions; legacy addons; in-line editing (math? fields?); bookmarks; and other stuff I understand even less. The experimental mode has been implicated in a failure to return to the previous location when re-opening a document (ref, 2012 Apr 15); and in LO 3.5 something experimental appears to cause a problem with Zotero (ref, 2012 Mar 7–13).
• Recent documents. There is no built-in way to manipulate the File ▶Recent Documents list. Apparently the HistoryManager extension can be used. Alternatively one could perhaps try to manually edit the Common.xcu file. If one does Tools ► Options ► LibreOffice ► Advanced ► Expert Configuration and searches for picklist, many items are displayed, including the items that are currently contained in the recent-documents list; presumably they can be edited, taking care not to make the HistoryItem and HistoryOrder lists inconsistent. To change the number of items kept in the list, one can change the value associated with the PickListSize property of the /org.openoffice.Office.Common/History preference.
• Reading XML. If a .od* file is unzip’d, the main content is found in the file content.xml. It is also possible to store a document in a ‘Flat XML ODF’ format (.fod*) format.

  By default, the XML has no line breaks so it is very hard to read. This can be changed by doing Tools ► Options ► LibreOffice ► Advanced ► Open Expert Configuration and toggling the PrettyPrinting property of org.openoffice.Office.Common ► Save ► Common (just search for pretty) from false to true. Two other methods of indenting it: (1) use the xmllint command from the libxml2 package; (2) use Benjamin Ferrari’s bf-pretty-print-xml-region Emacs function. I’ve included the latter in my Emacs customizations as fun-xml-indent.
  The command-line utility odt2txt pulls plain text out of .od* files, which may be useful for subsequent grep’ing, for example. The recoll full-text search package also handles .od* files.

• Citations and reference lists. Writer includes basic bibliographic support, but the use of Zotero is much preferable.
  • Immediately after a Zotero citation is inserted, the cursor is positioned at the end of the citation and one can enter new text without disturbing the citation field. Later, however, if one positions the cursor just after the citation and types something, the new text will be included in the citation field, which is always a bad idea. The only work-around that I know of is to type the Enter key, enter some new text, and then delete the paragraph break that was just created.
• RevealCodes. This is a feature that WordPerfect has and that all right-thinking people wish that OO/LO Writer had. It is not true that OO/LO’s emphasis on styles makes RevealCodes impossible to implement, and it is also not true that using styles makes RevealCodes useless. Some links:
  • Reveal Codes macro - feedback required: an OOo forum thread started by Iannz in 2004, looking for feedback on some macros that he was developing to prototype a RevealCodes-like function. Last post by Iannz dated 2007 Sep 13.
  • Iannz OpenOffice.org page contained links to versions 1, 2 and 3; latest version 2004 Nov 12. There is also a revised version dated 2022 Mar 21 by Andrew Pitonyak (discussed in this AOO e-mail list thread).
  • Working with properties: Wiki page started by Iannz on 2006 May 2, presenting revised routines from his RevealCodes macro and a main routine demonstrating their use. There was an edit by TJFrazier on 2009 Sep 1 to ‘fix several errors’. In trying the routines I discovered a bug due to a change in the API in OOo version 3.1 (Issue 103670).
  • Extensions development basic: Wiki page started by Iannz on 2006 Apr 4, as a beginner’s guide for writing macros in OOo Basic. Numerous revisions by others, most recently (as of 2016 Feb 6) on 2013 Feb 1.
  • OpenOffice Issue 3395 requesting RevealCodes function, started 2002 Mar 7; as of 2019 Jul 5, the issue has 202 votes and 164 comments; on 2016 Feb 1 the status was changed to ‘Issue to Resolved - Won't Fix’. LibreOffice issue 34002 was started 2011 Feb 7. As of 2022 Mar 22, the issue was last modified on 2021 Sep 16, by someone adding themselves to the CC list.
• Spelling dictionaries. Spelling dictionaries are provided for various languages. The ones currently installed can be seen by looking for languages with a check-mark in the Language drop-down list in the Font tab in the paragraph-style dialogue. Dictionaries can be obtained as LO extensions and as OO extensions, which at least for the most part are mutually compatible.

  By default, all words for which the user does Add to Dictionary go into standard.dic, regardless of language. Dictionaries can be added and managed at Tools ► Options ► Language Settings ► Writing Aids. A user’s custom dictionaries are kept in the same directory as standard.dic.

  In OOo < 2.0.3 the locations for spelling dictionaries could be seen and changed at Tools ▶ Options ▶ OpenOffice.org ▶ Paths. The dictionaries for various languages were found at ooo/ on the Writing aids path (normally Program Files/OpenOffice.org 2.0/share/dict/ooo/) as .dic (words) and .aff (rules) files (cf. Hacking OpenOffice.org dictionaries). Another dictionary called standard.dic was on the User-defined dictionaries path (normally in Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\OpenOffice.org2\user\wordbook) and was generally used to specify specialized terminology by right-clicking on a mis-spelled word and doing Add. (I preferred to have my personal dictionary in my home directory, and not called standard.dic, to make it easier to move among computers. One had to exit from the Quickstarter and restart OOo for external changes of dictionary names and paths to be picked up.) There were also two weird little dictionaries on the Dictionaries path, soffice.dic and sun.dic, for historical reasons; they could be disabled by unchecking them in Tools ▶ Options Language Settings ▶ Writing Aids. Additional user-defined dictionaries could also be created (and edited) in the same dialogue box.

  In version 2.0.3 the paths discussed above disappeared from the Paths dialogue; from 2.0.4 there was a new configuration file, paths.xcu, where paths that were not in the dialogue box can be changed (cf. 1, 2). In OOo 3 under Windows, paths.xcu is at c:/Program Files/OpenOffice.org 3/Basis/share/registry/data/org/openoffice/Office/

  In LO 3.5 under Linux the user’s standard.dic is in ~/.config/libreoffice/3/user/wordbook/. (Prior to 3.5 it was in ~/.libreoffice/3/user/wordbook/.) Built-in dictionaries are in /usr/lib/libreoffice/share/wordbook/.

  In LO 4.3 under MS Windows, standard.dic and any other user-defined dictionaries are in c:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\4\user\wordbook\. Built-in dictionaries are in c:/Program Files (x86)/LibreOffice 4/share/wordbook. Dictionaries installed as extensions are in c:/Program Files (x86)/LibreOffice 4/share/extensions.

  For LO 4.3 (but not for AOO 4.1) the path for dictionaries is specified in Tools ► Options ► LibreOffice ► Paths. Paths can be added and managed, facilitating the sharing of dictionaries among computers. (This is a feature that was lost in OOo 2.0.3. I don’t know the details of its restoration.)

• Removing line breaks. When passages of plain text are pasted into a document, there will often be spurious hard-return characters (↵) and/or paragraph endings (¶). To find and replace these, do the following in the Find & Replace dialogue box:
  • click on More Options
  • select Regular expressions
  • in the Search for field put \n (for hard returns) or $ (for paragraph endings)
  • in the Replace with field put a space character
  • do Find and Replace alternately, or Replace All if you’re brave
  Related things that you may want to find are tabs (use \t) and beginnings of paragraphs (use, e.g., ^.). Regular expressions can do much more than this; see the documentation.
• Removing hard returns 2. An alternative approach is to
  • go to Tools ▶ AutoCorrect Options ▶ Options
  • make sure that Combine single line paragraphs is checked, and adjust the line-length parameter if desired
  • position the cursor in the paragraph from which you wish to remove hard returns
  • make sure the paragraph has the Default style (why?)
  • do Format ▶ AutoCorrect ▶ Apply
  For some reason, the paragraph is changed from the Default style to the Text Body style (why??).
• Alternative Find & Replace. This AltSearch extension ‘adds many new features to Writer’s find & replace function’, including searching for character styles and many more things. As of 2024 Apr 16, the latest version is 1.4.2 dated 2017 Mar. Despite being old and unsupported, and apparently somewhat buggy, it has continued to do what I’ve asked of it.
• Multiple views. Editing or viewing multiple locations in document: use Window ▶ New Window
• Opening WordPerfect files. LibreOffice 3.5 can open WordPerfect files but Apache OpenOffice 3.4 cannot. Apparently there is an issue with the licence of the filter (ref)
• Grammar checking.
  • LanguageTool is an open-source grammar checker that can be integrated with AOO/LO or used separately. Sentences are parsed and then rules are applied; rules can be added using either XML or Java. As of 2014 Jul 4, the latest version is 2.6, dated 2014 Jun 30. Support for 29 languages has been at least started, with 5 languages (Catalan, English, French, German and Polish) having more than a thousand XML rules each.
    
  • After the Deadline is a grammar checker developed by Automattic. Among other platforms, a extension for OpenOffice was developed but on 2013 Aug 29 it was dumped onto Github and is no longer supported. As of 2014 Jul 4, the latest version on LO’s extension site is 0.3 (beta) dated 2011 Nov 18.
    
  • Lightproof is a light-weight language-neutral tool for developing grammar-checking extensions for OO/LO, written in Python. There are rule sets for English, Hungarian and Russian. The latest Debian package contains version 0.4.3 of the rules for English, dated 2014 May 15. At one point LO (3.5?) came with LightProof included.
    
  • Microsoft Word has a built-in grammar checker. The example is from Word 2010.
    
  • The Reverso free on-line tool is powered by the Ginger grammar checker, for which a free download is available for MS Windows. The licence of the downloadable software contains > 8200 words, as well as spelling and grammatical errors. The free licence is for a limited time and a limited number of uses, and possibly limited functionality; the paid licence must be renewed monthly. The software communicates with the company’s servers, requires a user ID and password, and performs updates without notification. Once you start the installer, you must accept the licence to continue but there’s no way not to accept; I was obliged to use the Task Manager to kill the process.
    
  • SpellCheckPlus free on-line tool. It is developed by Drs. Terry Nadasdi (Univ. Alberta) and Stéfan Sinclair (McGill Univ.). They recommend their BonPatron for French and SpanishChecker for Spanish.
    
• Java. During installation, if it doesn’t find Java on your computer, you can go and install Java, or just tell it to go ahead without Java; you may or may not notice missing features as a result. (Zotero won’t work without Java.) If you’re using a 64-bit version of OO/LO, make sure you get a 64-bit version of Java. Using the standard on-line installer may give you only the 32-bit version. If so, the off-line 64-bit installer can be downloaded from the manual download page.

Math (formulas/equations)

xkcd

• Resources. See Math Guide. See also Reference/Math commands, FAQ/Formula, Formula Reference Tables, and some additional stuff.
• Toolbar icon & quick formula insertion. There is a formula icon that can be added to a toolbar; it is equivalent to Insert ► Object ► Formula. (If necessary, right-click on the toolbar and select Customise Toolbar… to add the icon.) To quickly add a formula to a document, type the appropriate math markup codes (e.g., x=y^2) into the document, select (highlight) the text, and click on the formula icon. (There is another formula icon that is equivalent to Table ► Edit Formula, for primitive spreadsheet capabilities inside a Writer table.)
• Numbering. There is no dedicated feature for formula (equation) numbering as there is for pages, figures, etc., and nothing relevant appears in the Insert menu. Instead, there’s an Autotext defined for the purpose. Do Tools ▶ AutoText… ▶ Standard, select Formula Numbering and click on Insert. Or type fn (the Formula Numbering shortcut) where you want the formula to appear and press F3. The effect is to insert a table containing 1 row and 2 columns. The first cell contains a formula object. The second cell contains a text-number field that can be cited elsewhere by Insert ▶ Field ▶ More Fields ▶ Cross-references, selecting Type = Text and Insert reference to = Numbering, and clicking on Insert. (For further information: 1, 2.) See also Figure and formula numbering by chapter.
• Adding new symbols. To add a new symbol to the symbol catalogue, while editing a formula do Tools ► Symbols… and click on Edit…. Select your desired font and symbol, then type the name of your new symbol in Symbol and select which Symbol set to use (e.g., Special). Set the desired Style (standard, italic, bold or bold italic). Click on Add.

  (Things can get confused if you add a symbol, then delete it, then want to add it again. In one case I had to edit registrymodifications.xcu to remove references to symbol names that I had defined and then removed, to allow the names to be added again.)

• Spacing. See How do I change the spacing around my formula?. (If you use the SetMathBorder macro described there, make sure the formula editor isn’t active when you try running it, otherwise you may (will?) get the error message Property or method not found: getEmbeddedObjects.) The default spacing before and after formulas can be removed by selecting Format ► Styles and Formatting (or Styles ► Manage Styles), choosing Frame Styles, right-clicking Formula and selecting Modify, choosing the Wrap tab, and adjusting the values for Spacing.
• Alignment with surrounding text. For a long time there was a problem with the vertical alignment of formulas with the surrounding text (bug). As of version 3.4 there is a new feature: ‘there is a new check-box named 'Math baseline alignment' available in the 'Formatting Aids' tab of the Writer and WriterWeb option pages. When this option gets checked then *ALL* Math OLE objects already existing in the Writer document that are anchored 'as character' (and only those with this anchor type!) will be automatically aligned to match the baseline of the formula with the one of the surrounding text. Also new Math objects inserted later on will be automatically aligned as well. As long as this option is active manually [sic] movement of Math objects that are anchored 'as character' is not possible, and thus vertical alignment in the 'Object' context dialog is now disabled as well. For new documents this option is set by default.’ (ref) In my experience, after setting this option in an existing document it is at least sometimes necessary to double-click on an existing formula to get it to align properly, and sometimes the alignment is still not right.
• Vertical alignment of characters within formulas. There is a longstanding bug saying that ‘When the numerator or the denominator of the fraction contains only characters from the Catalog, then the alignment is incorrect’. One workaround is to add a null non-Catalog character by adding {}; for example, {{}%alpha} over {{}%beta}. This may be due to a problem in the OpenSymbol font used by default for such characters in formulas.
• Horizontal alignment within fractions. To force the numerator and denominator of a fraction to be horizontally centred, one can put alignc at the beginning of the formula (e.g., alignc x = {a over b c}. This isn’t always necessary, but it is necessary when the fraction includes quoted characters, such as {"d"x(t)} over {"d"y}.
• Character size in numeric fractions. The size command can be used with an absolute point size or with a relative size using +, −, * or /. For example, to make the numbers smaller in the fraction \( \frac{1}{6} \), one can do size *0.6 { 1 over 6 }, reducing the font size to 60% of the current font size.
• Fonts. When the main font for a document is changed, the fonts in all of the formulas should be changed to match. I have created a macro (based on the macro above for changing the spacing) which sets the fonts to hardwired values in all formulas. agn01 has a much more flexible macro. One of its options is to use the font from the Standard paragraph style; ’Standard’ is the internal name of the style called Default in English and Standard in French (ref.).
• Export to .doc. See TIP : How to convert equations from Openoffice to MS-Word (messages 2007 Dec – 2010 Apr); see also issue 53223 (2005 – 2011)
• Export to MathML. If a document is exported as XHTML then its formulæ will show up as MathML. For XHMTL export to be available, the XSLT sample filter component must be enabled (ref). If it was not enabled when OpenOffice/LibreOffice was installed under Windows, it can be added by going to Control Panel ► Programs ► Programs and Features, selecting OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and clicking Change. For XHTML export to work, apparently Java must also be installed and working with OpenOffice/LibreOffice; one way to test if Java is working is to try File ► Wizards ► Letter.

Impress

• Not full screen. If, when you start your slide show, it doesn’t take up the whole screen, go to Slide Show  ► Slide Show Settings and under Presentation Mode check that Full screen is selected.
• Use with Zoom. This assumes that you’re using a laptop with a built-in camera and an external screen. It is desirable to display the small version of the current slide, the next slide, the notes, the Impress in-show controls, and the Zoom controls all on the laptop’s screen, so you will be more or less looking at the camera.
  • Put Impress into full-screen mode, to avoid inadvertently displaying irrelevant or sensitive things to the audience.
  • In Impress, do Slide Show  ► Slide Show Settings and under Multiple Displays set Presentation display to Display 2 (external).
  • In Zoom, click on Share Screen, select your laptop screen, and click on Share.
  • In Impress, do Slide Show ► Start from … (for either the first slice or the current slide).
• Use with Zotero. Zotero can’t be used with presentation software in the same integrated way as with word processors. The easiest way to create a list of references in Impress is to use Quick Copy: select items in the middle column of Zotero and drag them into a text field in Impress (or into a Writer document and thence into Impress). To set the format for the copied references, in Zotero go to Edit ► Preferences ► Export.
• Master slides. Even if the master slide has a footer defined, it won’t appear in slides unless the Footer checkbox is checked in the View ► Header and Footer dialogue box.
• Font size. When entering text into a frame, the font size may be automatically reduced when the amount of text becomes large. This may be convenient but it leads to sloppy inconsistency of font sizes across slides. To turn off the behaviour, select the text box and do Format ► Object and Shape ► Position and Size… (or right-click the frame and select Position and Size…) and check the box Fit height to text. It’s not clear to me how this is related to enabling the Text toolbar and using the Fit text in textbox size option.
• Blank screen. If, when using 2 screens, the slide show itself shows up as blank on an external screen, try going to Tools ► Options ► LibreOffice ► View and disable Use hardware acceleration.
• Handouts. The Export as PDF function is not able to put multiple slides on each page. This can be done by printing to a file, but:
  • Under Windows, Impress sensibly arranges the slides based on Portrait orientation of the page but then (at least with CutePDF Writer) the pages are printed in Landscape mode, cutting off some of the contents.
  • Under Linux, the Print to file option produces only PostScript files, not PDF, and some versions of the Evince document viewer are unable to then print the PS file as PDF (bug). An alternative is to use the ps2pdf command (part of the ghostscript package).
• Video. What kind of video formats OO/LO will handle depends on the operating system and the installed codecs. I’ve had luck with Microsoft’ AVI format (.avi) under both Linux and MS Windows. LO under Linux uses GStreamer to play audio and video. Using Openshot under Windows 10 (with no additional codecs installed that I know of), the following behaviour was seen for a video clip exported with the three available flavours of AVI, with video profile VGA NTSC (640x480) and quality Low:

  Target	Display when editing	Play	File size (KB)
  AVI (h.264)	Icon (film strip)	Yes	2,014
  AVI (mpeg2)	Icon (lines + musical note)	No	3,039
  AVI (mpeg4)	1st frame	Bad flicker	2,800

  To convert a video file from, say, .mov to .avi, with the ffmpeg package installed, the following command works:
  ffmpeg -i name.mov name.avi

  To make a video clip loop for as long as its slide is displayed, click on the Repeat button that appears on the Media Playback toolbar that appears near the bottom of the OO/LO window when a video item is selected. This doesn’t apply to animated GIF’s, for which the looping behaviour is defined internally. For some reason a non-looping animated GIF returns to the first frame rather than staying on the last frame when finished; a crude work-around is to set a long delay for the last frame.

  Video files (incl. animation and movie files) are often linked to rather than being embedded. There does not currently appear to be an easy way to find out what path and file name are recorded for a particular item (cf. this bug report). One possibility is to open the .odp file with an unzip programme, extract content.xml and search for occurrences of xlink:href. The paths to linked files seem to be stored as relative paths (not absolute) so when copying a presentation to another computer it should be sufficient to copy the media files with the same relative directory structure. If the files have not yet been copied when the presentation is opened in the new location, they will of course not be found; once they have been copied, I’m not sure what is the minimum that needs to be done for them to be found. In one case it seemed that they weren’t seen immediately but that they were seen after one or two had been explicitly re-inserted from the new location.

Calc

In trying to draw box-and-whisker plots, I tried Advance Office Chart (produced plot but ugly) and Boxplots (nothing happened at final stage when Draw was supposed to be started). See LO bug 70361 and AOO bug 13184. See also list of missing chart types.

Draw

• SVG. OOo Draw requires an SVG Import extension in order to open SVG files.
• CAD. CADLO (AKA CADOO.o) is an extension that adds some CAD-type features to Draw. It is not currently (2014 May 31) in the extension repository; a new version (CADLO) is supposedly under development; meanwhile the old version (CADOO.o) can be downloaded directly.

Base

Base provides ‘native-support drivers for some of the most widely employed multi-user database engines’ as well as ‘built-in support for JDBC- and ODBC-standard drivers’ (ref). As built-in database engines, LO has long had HSQLDB (written in Java) and now also has Firebird (written in C++) (ref).

Special characters for formatting

There are various ways of entering these characters into a document. For example, under Linux, one can copy and paste from the Character Map application; select View ▶ By Unicode Block and look under General Punctuation.

Macros and macro libraries

In LibreOffice, the function Tools ▶ Macros ▶ Record Macro is disabled by default. To enable it in LO 3, do Tools ▶ Options ▶ LibreOffice ▶ General and click on Enable experimental (unstable) features. Starting with LO 4, do Tools ▶ Options ▶ LibreOffice ▶ Advanced and click on Enable macro recording (limited); the limitations apparently include opening or switching between windows, and changing anything but document contents.

If you export a macro library, it will be saved in a directory which has the name of the library. That directory will contain an XML file script.xlb which contains a line specifying the name of the library, plus a line for each module in the library. For each module the directory will contain an XML file module_name.xba. Each .xba contains the Basic script for the module wrapped in XML elements and with HTML entities for certain characters (e.g., &quot;).

I have a module Insert.xba located in userdir/basic/Fun/ (where userdir is a path as described below).

The module has the form of one-line subroutines for every special character that I want, plus a generic subroutine for inserting a string wherever the cursor is – whether in the main text, a footnote, a table or elsewhere. The macro does not attempt to identify and replace text that has been selected beforehand.

Below is shown a sample one-line subroutine for a specific special character, followed by the generic insertion subroutine.

Further information about macros:

• OpenOffice.org Macro Information by Andrew Pitonyak, includes many documents and links
  • Information about his book (Google Books preview)
  • Useful macro information for OpenOffice
  • Sun’s StarOffice 6.0 Software Basic Programmer’s Guide
• End-user macros for OOo

Customizing things

See above re custom icons.

In what follows, userdir refers to a path which is different for different OOo versions and for different operating systems. For example:

• ~/.openoffice.org2/user/
• ~/.openoffice.org/3/user/
• ~/.libreoffice/3/user/ (< 3.5)
• ~/.config/libreoffice/3/user/ (≥ 3.5, ref)
• ~/.config/libreoffice/4/user/
• C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\OpenOffice.org2\user\
• C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\OpenOffice.org\3\user (before Windows Vista)
• C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice.org\3\user (from Windows Vista)
• C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice\4\user
• C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\4\user (for LO 4 and 5)

To replicate my cusomizations after installing OO/LO on a new computer or (if necessary) after installing a new version:

• To install my own macros, I copy Fun/, dialog.xlc and script.xlc from/to userdir/basic/
• To install my AutoCorrect Options, I copy acor_en-CA.dat (and possibly files for other languages) from/to userdir/autocorr/
• To install my customized menubar, I copy menubar.xml from/to userdir/config/soffice.cfg/modules/swriter/menubar/
• To install my customized toolbars, I copy standardbar.xml and textobjectbar.xml from/to userdir/config/soffice.cfg/modules/swriter/toolbar/

As noted above, the zero-width space (to permit a line break) and the zero-width non-breaking space (or ‘word joiner’, to prevent a line break) are available in the Insert ▶ Formatting Mark menu only if ‘complex text layout’ (CTL) has been enabled.

If OOo acts oddly, the user profile may have been corrupted. See Resetting the user profile.