I think you will like this. For real. A long, detailed article on my use of mostly Linux and free, open-source software to write a large, complex, nonfiction military history book with 100K words and lots of images, tables and citations, covering various software, utilities and practices, efficiency and productivity factors, use of styles, navigation, quotation, annotation, highlighting and sharing tools, pros and cons of LibreOffice, Okular, GIMP, GwenView, Kate, and Octave, Android phone reading through Readera app, notes syncing via KDE Connect, Plasma desktop environment in Kubuntu - session save and stability, Firefox translation capabilities, online search engines - quality, accuracy, generic versus specialized queries, image search, and summaries, some problems and niggles, other observations, and more. Enjoy. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/history-book-linux-foss-other.html Cheers, Mrk
While reading the LibreOffice Writer section and remembering my struggles with styles and inserting images. My thoughts went to my struggles when moving from WordPerfect to MS Word with a side of WordStar. This is when I was involved with creating or editing technical documents. All of which went through WordStar to WordPerfect. I really liked WordPerfect and how it handled paragraph numbering, and paragraph formatting in general. Have to switch over to MS Word was painful. My main experience with LibreOffice is Calc. I was the Finance Office for a NGO I was a member in, did all of finances with Calc, including reports for government entities. In my mind it was more of why isn't Excel more compatible with Calc vice the normal think. I could so more in Calc, Excel was just not capable of doing some things, notably linking to other spreadsheets. I've used most of the tools you mention. Kate is my go to for writing code, mostly bash. I use GIMP mostly for cleaning up images, resizing and saving in a different formats. Okula does okay with PDF's, it complains with some forms but it does the job. I do use Gwenview, most foe viewing an cropping. All in all a very interesting article. I decide to read it first before upgrading webkit2gtk. I had a look at Octave, a lot of dependencies, many of which I already have. I still may install it. I currently use LabPlot to serve my plotting needs.
I use these days in LinuxMint OnlyOffice and has served me very well. I have also installed Microsoft fonts and also Calibri and it works great. I also think that Microsoft Office is the best one can use. Libre was too complicated for my taste.
Interesting takes, both of you. I also used WordPerfect, and I loved it, way more than MS Office. The one thing I didn't like was that by default, when writing with a justified layout, the first paragraph tab would be proportional to the number of words in the first row, so it would be indented differently each time. Mrk
I do recall that problem now that you mention it. I miss WordPerfect, while it had it faults, it was "perfect" in many respects. Having to switch over to MS Word was painful. Word just did things differently and in my opinion, not exactly in a use friendly way. I've been using LibreOffice a long time. At the NGO (all work no pay), I was lucky in not having to submit many documents up the chain. The ones I had to submit were simple Writer documents that converted over to MS Word without to many problems. As for the financial side with Calc, our auditor was good with just the printed reports. Sort of topic but one of the most annoying things regarding using Word or Calc is folks who don't know how to use them. Example, using hard returns instead of word wrap not understanding tabs.
