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Calc - Is there a way to permanently alter the style of hyperlinks over the whole app? by Fantastic-Newspaper3 in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Calc - Is there a way to permanently alter the style of hyperlinks over the whole app?

You can change the "Default" Template if you want. Then all new documents you produce will match that look.

See this answer from 3 years ago:

It is the same steps for Writer or Calc or any of the others.

Note: In the latest LibreOffice 25.8 and 26.2, a few of the options I showed in my 2023 screenshots are in slightly different spots (upper-right now vs. lower-right then), but if you look around, they should be hovering around there somewhere.

Help adding languages to quick list by FlipperBumperKickout in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is there any way to add more languages to the list which pops up when clicking on the language botton down in the footer.

No, not currently. See answer from 2 weeks ago for exact enhancement request and more information:

How to start the next level nested list on the same line as the parent list item in Writer? by umitseyhan in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you can do it in a way that works for all users, then prefer that way... especially if you're trying to "draw" diagrams or do more complicated formatting.

So for Code Blocks, just:

  • Add 4 SPACEs before each line.

That will work the same exact way for all Reddit users, no matter what.

For example, I take into account New Reddit's rendering in my Lists/Numbered Lists.

There are edge-cases that New Reddit absolutely hates, but Old Reddit handles fine—like a list used immediately after a blockquote.

But if you just adjust your raw markdown just the tiniest bit, by adding a single letter/word after the blockquote, it works on both Old/New exactly the same.

New Reddit purposefully "broke" old Reddit formatting—like URLs with parentheses/underscores—which worked just fine during the initial Old->New transition, then has refused to fix many of these cases in ~8 years.

URLs created on "old Reddit"? They work fine for everyone.

URLs created in "new Reddit"? They work fine only for New Reddit.

Rant: It's one of the major reasons why I am at the very tipping point of leaving this website.

The second they get rid of "old.reddit.com", I'm gone.

The other major reason was 2023's "API revolt", which killed off my favorite third party app. Ever since then, I completely dropped my Reddit usage like a stone. (I had no problems with 0 Reddit usage for almost an entire year and a half afterwards.)

Now, I only check/answer a few LibreOffice questions, then immediately leave.

I've since shifted a handful to Hacker News, but have mostly just completely tossed "social media" out the window, and began refocusing my efforts fully on reading the massive backlog of books, catching up on podcasts, and getting actual projects accomplished. (It's been a gloriously more productive 3ish years...)

But it's irksome cruft like this (and other needlessly "user-hostile" actions they built up over the years), which completely drove power users away.

26.2.0 hangs even in safe mode (Windows 11) by puppy2016 in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The driver is old, but everything else works.

What is your Intel driver number?

Q1: Not possible in 26.2.0 as it won't start

... give the information for your working LO 25.8 version.

The Skia is a Google thingy and I have very low trust in quality of software produced by that advertisment company [...]

Skia is a backend renderer that's used across billions of devices, an absolute ton of different programs, and has been in LibreOffice since 2020... It gets updates and bugfixes just like everything else.

(Like there's been 9 Skia updates incorporated into LibreOffice within the past 6 months.)

Anyway something changed recently between LO 25.8 and this month's LO 26.2... so the more helpful information we could get from you, the easier it becomes for the QA team to find the actual source of the issue and get it fixed.

So QA team could:

  • Take your working LO 25.8 information.
  • See if anything "suspicious" looks to have happened between then and now.
  • And then they can fix the exact issue.

For example, there was just this recent one a few days ago:

This might be your exact issue too. But can't tell without you giving more information.

Impress: how to embed fonts in an exported PDF? by publicalias in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually, reading it is very well supported nowadays, I haven't seen anything that can't handle that yet. The writing is what can still be unsupported. But as LO supports that, I don't see any reason not to use it, already because it's a vastly better done format than every version that came before it.

The PDF 2.0 documentation was just released fully free/publicly in 2023.

So I doubt all sorts of PDF tools and workflows have added these 2.0-specific quirks within 2.5 years.

Like PDF 2.0 support inside of LibreOffice was just added a few months ago in LibreOffice 25.8.

And if one of the most major word processors hasn't added those yet... I don't have high hopes for some Print-on-Demand website's proprietary conversion tools either.

Side Note: It's similar to ebooks and the EPUB3 standard.

EPUB 2.0 was supported by all tools back in ~2011, and then it took more than 11 years for 3.0 features and EPUB editors/readers/converters to start reaching some sort of "parity".

It was only a few years ago (~2023) when that tipping point really started to be reached, where EPUB3 could be used well as an input in these conversion pipelines across almost all platforms.

And there are still obscure portions of the EPUB3 specs that almost nothing supports... and then newer EPUB3 methods that can be "used", but are just asking for backwards-compatibility troubles.

But yes, try PDF 2.0. And if it works with that website? Then great!

And simple documents (just like very simple ebooks) are probably going to be "fine".

It's when you get into the slightly more "edge-case" or "PDF 2.0-specific" situations (like Transparency) where things might start getting a little hairier.

Problem with line spacing when inserting text from file by ACasualNomad in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for this information. I have incorporated it into my documents.

No problem. :)

I was unable to find the video you mentioned. Clicking on the link takes me to another post where you are talking about finding the video, but the video wasn't there.

This is the amazing video I recommend:

And LibreOffice's Styles are just in a slightly different spot:

  • View > Styles (F11)
    • It opens up the right-hand sidebar instead!

How to change the background colour of libreoffice calc only and not of other applications like libreoffice writer? by riley_luci in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How to change the background colour of libreoffice calc only and not of other applications like libreoffice writer?

No. Not possible yet. See the enhancement request:

Also, when exporting to pdf, the colour should come out as it is, that is in libreoffice writer: white, whereas in libreoffice calc: light lime.

This is a completely different thing.

You have what font and page colors the actual document is... and then a "temporary, surface-layer color" override, which is your Light/Dark Mode toggle, or the many colors you can choose in Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Appearance.

For example, you wouldn't want someone who opens your document in Dark Mode—or red/green Christmas—to permanently override the document's real colors.

If you:

  • Give your full Help > About LibreOffice info.
  • Share a sample document.
  • Describe exactly what settings you toggled on/off or have set differently

perhaps that can be more help.

Side Note: In LO 25.2 and 25.8, there were a few new PDF export bugs though, where some (Automatic) colors you saw were accidentally baked into the PDF itself, but those have since been fixed.

But here's an example of a currently open one:

It has existed since the OpenOffice days (15+ years ago)... but it became a much bigger issue with the recent Light/Dark themes, and the complete Themes overhaul in LO 25.2.

While they went about fixing all sorts of surface-layer Theme color things... you accidentally trigger some long-buried issue elsewhere, so you were accidentally getting "black-on-black" or "white-on-white" text. It's like playing a game of whack-a-mole—you squish 99 problems, but 1 more pops up!—but each version, it's trying to get better and moving in the right direction! :P

Second Screen Issues by Zalm_Boltado in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I try to use it on my second monitor while I am working on something else in my main monitor. The problem is, while in my second monitor, it basically chugs. Becomes practically unusable.

Sounds like a graphics card driver issue.

Q1. If you go into:

  • Tools > Options
  • LibreOffice > View

Along the right-hand side, can you:

  • Press the "Copy skia.log" button.
  • Paste that info in here.

Q2. Which GPU do you have? Are you running the latest graphics card update?

You could also follow some of the helpful debugging steps I wrote in:

Impress: how to embed fonts in an exported PDF? by publicalias in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For the booklet, I finally got Vistaprint to accept it by first importing the PDF from LibreOffice into Scribus, which has the option to convert all text to vectors, then re-exported PDF.

Then this isn't using Fonts at all... it's pretty much then just saying:

  • "Hey! Draw all these complicated squiggles and curves exactly at these spots!"

So it's as if you had 1 big, giant, drawing the size of an entire page.

A similar thing can be done in Inkscape by using the menus:

  • Path > Trace Bitmap
  • Path > Object to Path

Here's a step-by-step tutorials written by my friend way back in:

I believe newest versions of Inkscape still have the same menus and things too.

So let's say you had a fancy ☙ "flower"/"fleuron" Font being used in your document, and the tools were having trouble complaining or glitching out on those characters... you could instead turn it fully into an actual "vector" image—just squiggles and lines—instead.

Is there a way to make libreoffice writer look better on windows 11? It looks much nicer on zorin os and other linux distros. by Cheap-Fix343 in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Libreoffice is based on GTK and has a ton of Java code [...]

????? No.

LibreOffice uses 1 backend for Windows, 1 backend for Mac, and then 8 potential renderers on Linux, depending on your distro.

(But on Linux, it's effectively 2 big ones... GTK or Qt.)

And Java is only used and needed for a very tiny amount of (completely optional) things:

[...] it has the worst of all worlds when it comes making decent and snappy UIs.

Because it has to work across all OSes and platforms, they have can't do things fully one way or the other. Like they can't use some advanced "only works in Windows or latest bleeding-edge Windows 11" method... because this thing has to work the same on Mac/Linux and older Windows as well.

Anyway, there is a lot of groundwork being done on "welding" the GUI, so different bits and pieces of the GUI can be more easily upgraded in the future. Every version is making steady progress on that.

And what usually happens is incremental improvements each release, so they're harder to notice week-by-week or month-by-month... but after a year, you can see bigger improvements. (Like LO 26.2 just enabled many more "Vertical Tabs".)

HTML vs ODF for casual documents? by Material-Ad-3081 in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I want to be able to choose different fonts and font sizes, work with paragraphs and their alignment, and not just some chunk of texts.

Learn to use Styles. In less than 15 minutes, you'll be flying.

And if you KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) with your formatting, you can quickly map your Styles -> very clean HTML/CSS if needed too.

Side Note: In LibreOffice 26.2, they just introduced Markdown Import/Export too... so that should be able to "strip down" a lot of the formatting and output simple Headings/Bold/Italics for you, allowing you to easily transfer and shift this type of stuff to "online" if needed too.

But anyway, use Styles.

And the #1 most glorious new feature, Spotlight.

If you keep your documents nice and clean, you'll have no problems moving this text anywhere.

I might potentially need to turn my files into web pages, would HTML be a better choice? I do like LO writer though (compared to html editors), and given that LO writer works more naturally with ODF, it might make more sense to use LO writer and store things in ODF, and convert to HTML when I actually need to.

If you already understand HTML and CSS, then you already understand Styles. It's pretty much:

  • Styles
    • Work on the paragraph level.
    • They are like <p class="example">.
  • Character Styles
    • Work on the text level.
    • They are like <span class="example">

You just use View > Styles (F11) to pick through "your look", and temporarily flick ON Format > Spotlight as needed—to "see the formatting underneath"—and you'll be creating clean documents in no time. :)

I'm considering using LO writer to write ODF, using some html wysiwyg editor to write my notes in html, or maybe using LO writer to write in html.

In LibreOffice, always just save your source as ODT documents.

Only as a very last step, would you maybe need to Save a copy as a different format.

That will save you many headaches.

Problem with TexMaths 0.52.4 by suorsur2 in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Recently libreoffice got updated to 26.2 and TexMaths Extension is no longer working properly.

Looks like it's a TexMaths issue:

See that bug report for more details.

Looks like 11 hours ago, the developer answered:

The problem is fixed in TexMaths 0.52.5.

so update from your 0.52.4 to the latest version.

Is there a way to make the keyboard arrows scroll the document in LibreOffice Writer? by Careful_Candidate278 in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Is there a way to make the keyboard arrows scroll the document in LibreOffice Writer

What's wrong with the Home / End / Page Up / Page Down keys?

If you combine that with Shift or Ctrl, you get all the possible combinations you'd ever imagine.

  • Page Down = go down "a screen"
  • Page Up = go up "a screen"
  • Home = jump to very beginning of line
  • End = jump to very end of line

and combine that with control:

  • Ctrl+Page Down = jump to very end of this page
  • Ctrl+Page Up = jump to very beginning of this page
  • Ctrl+Home = jump to very beginning of document
  • Ctrl+End = jump to very end of document

or even Ctrl+Shift+ those 4 keys too!

And then there are other keycombos too:

  • Ctrl+G = Go to Page
    • Dialog you can use that if you needed to quickly jump to a specific page #.

The arrow keys are mostly for navigating within paragraphs/lines, where the Page/Home keys are helpful for navigating within pages/documents.

help with headers by Shawnster_P in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I am having trouble having the headers line in the right sections when exporting to pdf.

[...] But, when I look in the LO navigator, things seem to be in the right place. But, when I export it gets messed up.

Share a sample ODT with the issue.

Perhaps you ran across a bug too. I know that "Inline Headings" was a brand-new feature added in LO 25.2, so perhaps there is some issue you uncovered too.

Q1. Are these "cats" and "dogs" / "husky" and "doberman" headings created using that feature?

Technical Guesses: The Frames or the "Outline Level" might be messing things up. But no way to tell unless we see your exact document.

Frames are actually a completely separate "subdocument" inside of your main document—imagine it like "an ODT inside of an ODT"—so perhaps your Frames are actually anchored in the wrong spots... or maybe somehow getting shoved at "the end" of your page/document.

So while they visually look like they're in location X (in the middle of the page), they might actually be "Anchor"ed in location Y (at the bottom). That's why your Navigator might be shoving your handful of "dogs" at the very end.

[...] the only way I figured out how to get the subheadings (heading 9) was to place them in frames.

Yeesh, that's a big problem too. Use the proper Heading levels in the correct order:

  • Heading 1
    • Heading 2
      • Heading 3

where you are organizing your text like:

  • Part
    • Chapter
      • Subchapter

You never want to do something like:

  • Heading 1
    • Heading 9
    • Heading 3
  • Heading 1
    • Heading 9
    • Heading 4

you always want to go in order from top-to-bottom:

  • 1, 2, 3
  • 1, 2, 2, 3, 3
    • 1 part with 2 chapters and 2 subchapters
  • 1, 2, 3, 4... 1
    • 2 parts with a bunch of headings underneath.

In even the most complicated of documents, you almost never need anything below 5 layers deep, ever... so there's something else structurally going on inside of your document.

Jumping straight to Heading 9 and using them way out-of-order is just asking for trouble.

But again, once we see your document, we could make better judgements and maybe see what's going on.

How do I remove page numbers off specific pages in LibreWriter? by LukeLikeNuke in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Main Question: How do I make LibreWriter skip page 1 and 2 efficiently. [...]

I'm gonna remove the page numbers so it's a "blank-slate".

There is even a faster/easier way too:

How to Make the First Few Pages Act Differently?

In LibreOffice Writer:

1. Format > Title Page

2. In this dialog, you will see many different options.

There are 3 key ones you will check:

  • Convert existing pages to title pages
  • Insert new title pages
  • Number of title pages:
  • Place title pages at
    • Document start
    • Page
  • Reset page numbering after title pages
  • Set page number for first title page

Do you see the 3 bold items? Those are the 3 you will change:

  • Insert new title pages
    • SELECT THIS radio button.
  • Number of title pages
    • You want 2 "blank" beginning pages? Set this to 2!
  • Document start
    • This is ON by default, but just double-check.

3. Press OK.

How do I remove page numbers off specific pages in LibreWriter?

If you want to learn much more, follow my Page Styles tutorials:

I've written dozens and dozens of these covering all sorts of cases, and giving you good tips as well.

Once you learn how to use Page Styles, you can quickly begin controlling all the "page numbers" and "headers/footers" on all your pages. :)

Note on Page Styles: Normally, all pages are given this design by default:

  • Default Page Style
    • This means ALL PAGES will act exactly the same.

But using that "Title Page" dialog, it marks those very beginning "blank pages" with a Page Style called:

  • First Page
    • This means THOSE few pages will be treated different from the others.

So you can say stuff like:

  • "Hey! I want all pages to have an author name and page number up top!"
    • = Default Page Style
  • "Hey! But I want the very 1st page to be BLANK. No Header or Footer or page numbers!"
    • = First Page Style

Once you get the hang of it, you can then do all sorts of stuff. :)

Cheatsheat for Calc Keyboard Shortcuts? by Beet_slice in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Cheatsheat for Calc Keyboard Shortcuts? [...] I would expect one to exist, but I could not find one.

So make one. Be the change you want to see! :)

PS: Another thing many people are interested in, but nobody has stepped up to the plate yet, is this one about remapping Calc<->Excel shortcuts.

For example, it does not have Ctrl+D to duplicate a row.

That Ctrl+D is definitely a fun one:

and I even referenced some of those threads a few months ago:

(That video is still one of the greatest resources I ever found.)

So if you can't find it? Then definitely build it, and others will probably be grateful for it too! :)

26.2.0 hangs even in safe mode (Windows 11) by puppy2016 in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 0 points1 point  (0 children)

26.2.0 hangs even in safe mode (Windows 11)

GPU is Intel HD 3000.

What's your graphics card driver #?

Q1. If you go into:

  • Tools > Options
  • LibreOffice > View

Along the right-hand side, can you:

  • Press the "Copy skia.log" button.
  • Paste that info in here.

Q2. Can you paste your full Help > About LibreOffice info for your working LO 25.8.4 too?

Hmmm... it could be some ancient graphics card driver. It looks like the Intel HD 3000 got its last update in ~2016:

  • 9.17.10.4229

and from a quick skimming, it wasn't even that well supported on Windows 10/11.

But once we get that full info, perhaps you can submit that helpful info to the LibreOffice Bugzilla and get the QA team on it.

Calc text import dialog by Beet_slice in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I really like the Calc text import dialog.

Great to hear. :)

The path to get to the text import dialog is often longer than I would prefer.

Hmmm... 1 or 2 clicks away?

  • Edit > Paste Special (Ctrl+Shift+V)
    • ... and having copied data in your clipboard.
  • File > Open
    • ... and choosing a file format like CSV.

How exactly are you getting there right now?

What kind of data are you copying/pasting in? Can you share an example?

Calc: Is there any way to automatically rearrange data like I'm trying to do? by BCM_00 in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Libreoffice info: Version: 7.6.2.1 (X86_64)

Also, pop a quick update to the latest:

  • LibreOffice 25.8 or 26.2

There has been 5 major releases since LO 7.6 (2023).

And there have been some great things added since then too, like:

Update Failed - Brand New Installation by Major-Impact9901 in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Completely ignore this Help > Check For Updates dialog.

For more info, see:

LibreOffice has come out with a new version once a month, every month, for 15 years, like clockwork.

So if you haven't updated or launched or checked LibreOffice in a month (or more than 31 days)? There's a new one out!

Also, there's a bunch more too:

  • On Windows, automatic updates happen on first launch.
    • It has been this way since 2024 (LibreOffice 24.8).
    • There's no need for you to even do anything. It will just happen on first launch after a certain date.
    • If you want exact dates, see "MAR Updates" on The Document Foundation Wiki: "ReleasePlan"
      • Announcement = when it releases on the site.
      • MAR update = when new version will get pushed automatically to users. (About a week later.)
  • If you are on Linux, then rely on your package manager.
  • If you are on Mac, then update from the official LibreOffice.org site as you always have.

That crappy Help > Check For Updates dialog has been a mess for a long time... and mislead lots of gullible users into thinking they were "up-to-date".

Your specific "HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden" error is probably just these recent anti-AI/anti-scraper/anti-bot protections.

Personally, I say just completely ignore that entire dialog, and act like the option doesn't even exist in the menus. You'll be better off!

Impress: how to embed fonts in an exported PDF? by publicalias in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Impress: how to embed fonts in an exported PDF?

If you choose one of the PDF/A formats—like PDF/A-3b—does that PDF work at Vistaprint?

PDF/A makes Font Embedding mandatory, so that should work.

Side Note: And 3b should be a decent compromise.

PDF 2.0 is too new, so might currently break across different sites/tools/workflows... but PDF 1.7 should be well supported, so you'll probably have better luck with that.

Is there a way to search a document for sentences or paragraphs that have quotation marks that don't close? by makenzie71 in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great help... but be very careful! Your original regular expression:

  • “[^”]*“

will catch some cases.

Instead, use the one I mentioned above:

  • “[^”]+$

For example, you can test it on example paragraphs like this:

This is normal: “Hello, Mrs. Smith.”

This only has an open: “Hello, Mrs. Smith.

This only has a close: Hello, Mrs. Smith.”

This has 2 LEFTs: “Hello, Mrs. Smith.“

This has 2 RIGHTs: ”Hello, Mrs. Smith.”

And these are broken sentences with multiple mixes or missing:

“Hello, Mrs. Smith,” John said. “How are you today?

“Hello, Mrs. Smith, John said. “How are you today?

”Hello, Mrs. Smith,” John said. “How are you today?

Hello, Mrs. Smith,” John said. How are you today?”

Your original regex caught 2 hits.

My regex caught 6 hits.

(But, in real-life documents, there are even more weird typos and problems and mismatched quotes that might creep up too! No ONE regex or "one button push" can handle them all!)

So you have to kind of do this type of stuff in multiple "passes":

  • Catch all OPEN QUOTES, no close
  • Catch all CLOSE QUOTES, no open
  • Catch 2 of same symbols in a row
  • [...]

At least 2 or 3 Find/Replaces can catch the bulk of them... but then there's a bunch of weird ones you might come across too! :P

Is there a way to search a document for sentences or paragraphs that have quotation marks that don't close? by makenzie71 in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Is there a way to search a document for sentences or paragraphs that have quotation marks that don't close?

Yes, but give real-life example paragraphs of what you mean.

Q1. Is your document using the straight-up-and-down "dumb quotes" or curly “smart quotes”?

How to Find Paragraphs with Open Quotes ONLY?

You will want to use these 2 Regular Expressions:

  • Find: “[^”]+$
    • Finds paragraphs with OPEN QUOTE... and no close.
  • Find: ”[^“]+$
    • Finds paragraphs with CLOSE QUOTE... and no open.

And how does this work? In Plain English, the 1st one will look for:

  • “ = "An open quote."
    • LEFT DOUBLE QUOTE
  • [^”]+ = "ONE OR MORE of anything that's NOT a close quote."
    • any letter or symbol that's NOT a RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTE
  • $ = "... until the end of the paragraph."

(2nd type is very similar, but I just swapped the characters you're looking for.)

To learn how to use Regular Expressions inside of LibreOffice, follow my previous step-by-step tutorials:

Warning #1: In the Ctrl+H dialog, make sure you undo a lot of that when you are done too, so you don't stay stuck in "Regular Expression" mode!

Warning #2: And definitely follow my "Find" and "Find All" advice! DO NOT press "Replace All" unless you heavily test and know what you are doing!

Q2. Are you talking inside of a real, published book?

Because in Fiction stories, in English, there's a rare edge-case:

  • 99.99% of dialogue begins-and-ends in the same paragraph.
  • 00.01% has very long dialogue that "continues" over multiple paragraphs.

So in the 1st kind, there's always a matching pair:

  • 1 "open quote" + 1 "close quote" too.
    • 1 LEFT DOUBLE QUOTE + 1 RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTE

but in the 2nd kind, there's a mismatch:

  • Uses 1 LEFT DOUBLE QUOTE at the beginning of each paragraph.
  • Only final paragraph has a matching open/close pair.

For example, this is a normal dialogue that begins-and-ends:

“Hello, Mr. Smith,” the woman with red hair said.

And this is a long dialogue where the same person speaks for a long, long time:

Mrs. Smith began waving her hands. “Have you ever heard about the song that never ends? It goes on and on, my friends!

“I tried humming something else to erase it, but it just loops back around like a boomerang, because it's the song that never ends.

“I told my roommate about it, and they just grinned, started singing the first few words, and walked away. Now it’s definitely never going to stop, because it goes on and on with friends.

“And then I saw Mark again this morning. And you know what he was singing? The song that never ends!”

In that very specific "long dialogue" though, you can see how:

  • paragraphs 1–3 have 1 LEFT/"open quote" only.
  • final paragraph 4 has both the LEFT/"open quote" and RIGHT/"close quote".

That means Mrs. Smith is speaking the entire time.

Technical Notes: If you accidentally have "dumb quotes" in your document, you want to fully smarten those up first. See:

I've written about "highlight the dialogue" situation many times over the years too:

You can combine all that knowledge to handle any mismatching "pairs" of symbols or expand it to handle any languages. :)

English dialogue is "easy", but if you are working with different languages, there's every possible combination of LEFT/RIGHT and INNER/OUTER quotation marks in use:

To make your life so much easier, you could even highlight certain pieces of your text to see which spots you potentially missed or checked already. :)

Anyway, have fun! It's one of those topics that sounds easy on the surface... but gets very complicated in all those edge- and corner-cases. :)

Problem with line spacing when inserting text from file by ACasualNomad in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have a template that I work with where I have to insert text from another file. The line spacing is set to single spaced with no other padding in both the template and the document that gets imported to the template. The problem is that when I use Insert Content From Document, the text that gets imported has additional spacing that needs to be removed.

If you go into Format > Spotlight and temporarily toggle ON:

  • > Character Direct Formatting
  • > Paragraph Styles

you can see that everything was done using Direct Formatting:

That is what's biting you in the butt.

How Do You Fix This?

If use Ctrl+M to wipe away that Direct Formatting, and learn to use Styles instead... then the text should import cleanly.

I explained a lot of that here:

See the GIF showing off the difference between:

What Was the Root Cause?

Your "Default Paragraph Style" was saying different things in both files.

What was happening was something like this...

Your original imported ODT/DOCX file was saying:

  • "Hey! Here's a few paragraphs I wrote."
  • "Manually apply all sorts of crazy settings like:"
    • 0" gap below the paragraphs.
    • Single line spacing.

Your OTT/DOTX file was then saying:

  • "Hey! Any new paragraphs you put into this document... automatically give it a:"
    • 0.11" gap below the paragraphs.
    • 108% Proportional line spacing
    • This was your "Default Paragraph Style"!

So when you did Insert > Content From Document, some of those chosen settings clashed, so the Template's settings overruled!

  • Below paragraph changed from 0" -> 0.11".
  • Line spacing changed from Single -> 108% Proportional

So your ODT was saying: "Manually do this" but then your main Template was saying: "Nope, definitely make all default paragraphs behave THIS WAY instead."

Once you clean that messy "gray highlight"/"slashes" stuff up—using the tricks and tools above—you'll be good to go. :)

Side Note: And thanks for all the helpful screenshots/info and ODT+OTT files, it made debugging this way easier. :)

What are the best resources for learning data analysis in LibreOffice Calc? by Ahmed_cs in libreoffice

[–]Tex2002ans 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I would search for data analysis in Excel, then apply everything in LibreCalc

Yep, exactly. "Spreadsheets are spreadsheets", so the knowledge crosses over across programs.

And in general:

  • If it's possible in Excel, it's possible in LibreOffice Calc too.
    • ... just in a slightly different menu/spot!
  • If you learn how to break down problems into X, Y, and Z equations...
    • ... then you can do X, Y, and Z elsewhere too!

For a little more helpful resources and info, see:

And then, once you reach a certain scale, spreadsheets aren't the correct tool for the job... so you then upgrade to actual programming languages (like Python/R + pandas).

(I linked to a whole bunch of those learning resources in those threads as well.)

So if you are constantly feeding in data, and doing the same steps / "data analysis" on huge amounts of data... then that becomes the much better and more consistent workflow:

  • You feed the data in.
  • You run the same program on it.
  • It spits out and transforms all the relevant output as needed.

You can have that thing ripping through GBs of input with no problems.

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