Writing high quality documents with Libreoffice

There is some sort of shared knowledge available that existing WYSIWYG text processors are not able to create academic text especially if they are longer and if the quality requirement are high. And of course the more powerful alternative is LaTeX, Lyx and other authoring tools like Framemaker.

The reason why especially the Lyx software is a great choise for creating technical documents is because it combines an outline editor for creating the content on a textual level with the powerful latex backend to render the document in a high quality PDF version.

But sometimes there is a need to create documents without latex and the question is if this is possible at all? The following blog post tries to explain how to create technical documents only with the libreoffice program which is preinstalled in the Debian operating system.

After starting the Libreoffice software the first time it will look like in the screenshot. The user sees a blank page and a blinking cursor. Also the user sees lots of icons and formatting symbols to change the font which is pershaps the main reason why experienced latex users doesn't like such a software very much. In Libreoffice there is no clear seperation between content and layout and the user can modify both in the text which makes it hard to focus only on the text.

The first step is modify the GUI a bit so that it will look like the lyx GUI. The Libreoffice program has a feature called navigator which can be compared with the outline view of lyx. the navigator shows the document structure in a side tab.

Suppose, the user has entered some text and want to change the font. In LaTeX and lyx as well the only way in doing so is to adjust the global font parameter which will affect the entire document. The Libreoffice program has a similar feature which is hidden in styles->edit style->font

Getting a preview of the pdf file is a bit complicated. First thing to do is to swtich to the normal view and then the print preview button is visible.

The main problem with the software is, that there are an endless amount of buttons and menus available. The user has to learn to ignore most of them. In contrast, latex and lyx has a more minimalistic approach. But from a tehcnical perspective, libreoffice can replace lyx very well. It has also the ability to act as an outline editor and it is also possible to render the document into a pdf file.

Let us focus on the core element of an outline editor which is the outline pane. Unfurtunately the Libreoffice tool window looks a bit messy. It contains a lot of icons and the size is fixed. This makes the interaction compared with the Lyx software difficult. But, it is not impossible to use the software. In theory the user is able to create and edit outline oriented text content in Libreoffice similar to other authoring software like emacs org mode or the scrivener app.