In today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* LibreOffice Pros and Cons
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” Mae West
LibreOffice Pros and Cons
Sorry I’m a little late this morning. I had to go fasting for labs this morning. Strictly routine.
Also, I thought I would post reviews (pros and cons) for both LibreOffice and WPS Office in the same post a day or two from now, but that is not to be. The post would be far too long.
So here’s my review of LibreOffice. And frankly, thanks to the first two Pros, I was pulling for it.
Yesterday I wrote a little over 2000 words on my current novel, and I did so with LibreWriter, part of LibreOffice. Here’s what I learned:
PROS
LibreOffice is always completely free, an open-source program developed by The Document Foundation, which is headquartered in Germany. There are offices and support staff in the United States.
LibreOffice can export to .pdf as well as .epub. For a prolific writer and independent publisher, I see this as a good thing.
That said, I have not verified whether an .epub file generated with LibreOffice would pass the EPUBCheck validation process, and the LibreOffice help forum says nothing about it that I could find.
If I end up using LibreOffice full time, I will generate an .epub file as a test, then run it through the EPUBCheck validator. To check your own .epubs, visit https://www.w3.org/publishing/epubcheck/.)
Libre Calc, the spreadsheet program of LibreOffice, seemed to handle everything just as Office 365 Excel does.
CONS
It’s a little difficult to set up the menus and toolbars, the latter serving as the equivalent to the Quick Access toolbar in Office 365. Once you find Settings it goes a little easier, but it’s still clunky at best.
LibreOffice does not automatically adjust spacing when you select and move or delete a word or words. You have to be attentive. Or maybe after you’ve finished the story, run the Find & Replace tool to find all double and triple spaces and replace them with single spaces. This is not a huge problem, but it is annoying.
Another, more annoying spacing issue—I prefer to eliminate the chunk of white space between pages. You can do that with a double-click, just as in Office 365.
But when the pages are scrunched together in Office 365, there is still a small space after the last line of the previous page and before the first line of the current page.
In LibreOffice, there is zero space after the last line of the previous page. In fact, the line that marks the end of the page actually cuts off any descenders from the line of text above it. As with every other problem I had with LibreOffice, there was no mention of how to adjust that space in the online Help program.
LibreOffice has no shortcut keys for inserting symbols or special characters.
I thought I had a work-around for this one, but (and this is big) LibreOffice also has no auto-correct or auto-format feature. Nor does LibreOffice Help recognize either term.
So (for example) you can’t set the word processor to replace two hypens with an em dash with auto correct. For me, this is huge.
As an aside, at the bottom of the boilerplate for the Journal, I have a set of characters I need from time to time. In case you’re interested, here they are:
em dash —
en dash –
degree symbol °
é ñ á í ó ¢ ç © ï ¶ ¡ ¿
● ▪
When I need a special character, I simply copy and paste it. But I don’t want to include something like this in a fiction I’m writing or have to interrupt the flow to hunt-up a special character from the Insert Symbol dialogue box and insert it manually.
The Find & Replace dialogue box doesn’t adjust to show more or fewer options. There is only the larger size. This isn’t a deal breaker, but it’s annoying.
LibreOffice does not have a “Return to where you left off” feature. This is at least an annoying inconvenience.
I can either scroll to the white space at the end of a document or, if I left off somewhere in the middle, I can remember to highlight a few lines of text and return there at the next session. But the auto-return feature is awfully handy. It’s the one reason I eventually preferred Office 365 over Office 2010.
Okay, that’s it. I will make recommendations to the LibreOffice folks and hope one of the next few releases improves these issues. Against that possibility, I will keep LibreOffice in my computer.
Today, I’ll open the current novel again and pick up where I left off yesterday, but today I’ll test WPS Office.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
See ‘The Pareto Principle for Writers” at https://killzoneblog.com/2023/08/the-pareto-principle-for-writers.html. Garry’s posts are always good.
See “How to Escape Imposter Syndrome in Your Writing Life” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/how-to-escape-imposter-syndrome-in-your-writing-life/.
See “Book Family Tree: A New Way to Think About Your Book” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/book-family-tree-a-new-way-to-think-about-your-book/. About selecting genres, I believe.
See “Best Fantasy Book Covers Of 2023: 7 Tips To Inspire” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/best-fantasy-book-covers-of-2023-7-tips-to-inspire/.
See “Difficult Empathies” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/difficult-empathies/. Some of the books below the post looked interesting.
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 870
I removed the stats for Rose Padilla (WCG10SF5) until I resume writing it again.
Writing of Blackwell Ops 9: Cameron Stance
Brought forward………………………… 4087
Day 1…… 1595 words. To date…… 5682
Day 2…… 2101 words. To date…… 7783
Day 3…… 2573 words. To date…… 10356
Day 4…… 1588 words. To date…… 11944
Day 5…… 2135 words. To date…… 14079
Fiction for August……………………… 20595
Fiction for 2023………………………… 135142
Fiction since August 1………………… 20595
Nonfiction for August…………………… 14470
Nonfiction for the year……………… 164370
Annual consumable words………… 299512
2023 Novels to Date……………………… 2
2023 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2023 Short Stories to Date……………… 4
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………… 73
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)… 221
Short story collections…………………… 31
Disclaimer: I am a prolific professional fiction writer. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Unreasoning fear and the myths of writing will slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.