OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice

OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice information

A rose by any other name

OpenOffice.org is now replaced by LibreOffice.

Getting documents to remember where you were up to

If LibreOffice won't remember your last position in a document, it is probably because it does not know who you are so cannot look up your last saved position. Tools, Options, LibreOffice, User Data and enter your name and initials. It will from then on save your position in a file when you save it and return to that position when you re-open it.

Joining lines

When you paste text from a .PDF each line has a paragraph mark at the end. To join these lines together, select them then Format, AutoCorrect and either Apply or Apply and Edit Changes.

Wrinkles: apparently this only works on paragraphs in the "Default Style" paragraph style. The line length is set at 50% by default in the Tools, AutoCorrect Options settings under Options, Combine single line paragraphs if length greater than 50%.

UK English thesaurus not working / greyed out

Sometimes the Thesaurus option is greyed out. Fixing this can be a challenge. It is specifically a UK English problem, made all the more annoying by most of the solutions being "use en-us".

One options was to link the US files to GB files:

cd /usr/share/myspell/dicts
sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.dat th_en_GB_v2.dat
sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.idx th_en_GB_v2.idx

or it might be:

sudo aptitude install myspell-en-gb libreoffice-grammarcheck-en-gb mythes-en-gb

but that looked unwise for LibreOffice v4.2.8.2 because of all the dependency issues it was going to create, probably because it is a Debian solution.

This page is probably the place to go for a definitive, up-to-date answer. But even that is not working for me.

Doing the above and then the following did work:

sudo apt-get install libmythes-1.2-0 hunspell
sudo apt-get install mythes-en-us hunspell-en-us
cd /usr/share/mythes/
sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.idx th_en_GB_v2.idx
sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.dat th_en_GB_v2.dat