Comments on: Formatting your book with OpenOffice

By: R. E. Hunter

R. E. Hunter — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 01:35:47 +0000

Looks interesting. I’ve been meaning to investigate whether LaTeX could generate the different e-book formats from a single master document, and LyX could be a good way to work with LaTeX. When I read about having to nuke all the formatting in a document and reapply chapter titles and so on, or having to maintain different versions of a document for different targets, it strikes me that there is something wrong with the tools.

By: R. E. Hunter

R. E. Hunter — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 01:31:36 +0000

How long ago was that? The development has been proceeding very fast. I installed 3.4.4 in November, and it’s already up to 3.5.0. But with all the changes they’ve made, it’s quite possible they broke some things along the way (that’s the nature of software). If you found any specific bugs you might want to report them (if they haven’t been already), and try it again in a few months.

Incidentally, both can be installed side by side, and documents are compatible between them since they both use the Open Document Format (http://opendocumentformat.org/) natively. But as usual, keep backup copies if you’re not sure.

By: DDW

DDW — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:42:18 +0000

LyX – Free and will give you output every bit as good as InDesign. I’ve never tried setting it up on windows so I can’t speak to how easy that is. Should be an easy choice for Linux users.

By: Barbara Morgenroth

Barbara Morgenroth — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:38:22 +0000

Non vote for Libre Office. I downloaded it thinking it was newer and spiffier but switched back to OO when I couldn’t get the results I needed.

By: Passive Guy

Passive Guy — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:05:01 +0000

Thanks for that tip, Megan.

By: Passive Guy

Passive Guy — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:04:32 +0000

Another vote noted for LibreOffice.

By: Passive Guy

Passive Guy — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:04:00 +0000

I need to try LibreOffice sometime, JS.

By: Megan

Megan — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:33:46 +0000

I know I’ll use OpenOffice to convert a Word doc, but it always introduces horrendous formatting errors if I dare save it to a native format. Basically, I pull the Word .rtf, open it in OpenOffice, correct the weird things OO did to my centered lines, do. not. save. it. (or those will be reintroduced and more besides), and export to .html, which I can then convert through Calibre to a gorgeous .mobi with pictures.

By: R. E. Hunter

R. E. Hunter — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 19:09:36 +0000

I left this comment on the original article, but I’ll repeat it here for the benefit of readers here:

You might want to try LibreOffice http://www.libreoffice.org/) instead. This is a fork of OpenOffice with more active development and bug fixes. Long story, but when Oracle bought Sun they mismanaged it, and all the key developers moved to LibreOffice. Freed of corporate oversight they were able to clean up years of backlogged bugs in a few months, so LibreOffice is now a far better product.

By: J S

J S — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:30:00 +0000

I used OOo for a long time but switched to LibreOffice after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems (that organized the open source coding teams). LibreOffice is self managed now and making very impressive progress.

I helped a local author format his book for Createspace and his Word document was a mess. I fixed it with LibreOffice and put it in Createspace’s template for him. He’s now running LibreOffice and happy for his next projects.

My own books I’m selling only electronically and use LibreOffice the whole way. I’ve even resurrected old Word files from the 1990′s and brought them in to finish on LibreOffice. It works great and costs ‘write’