New LibreOffice Book

users
#1

For those who may have missed it, I would like to recommend a new book by
Bruce Byfield called "Designing with LibreOffice." I have absolutely no
connection whatever to this author or book, by the way.

As with the normal LibreOffice manuals, the book can be purchased as a
paperback or downloaded free as a pdf or odt document (with an optional
contribution, of course) at
http://designingwithlibreoffice.com/download-buy/

Bruce approaches LibreOffice not from the standpoint of menu functions and
such, as the manuals do and should do, but as a document design and creation
tutorial. This approach serves to show the purpose of LO's features and how
to use them effectively. There are numerous tips throughout the book that
are obviously the result of much use of the product's components. His
discussion of styles, their importance, and their use is as good as any I've
run across.

This results-driven approach is also valuable because the author not only
isn't shy about suggesting which features of LO are best avoided for one
reason or another, but offers alternatives to achieving the desired
objectives in such cases.

The best compliment I can give the book is to say that I learned quite a bit
about some of the capabilities of Writer and Calc that I wasn't aware of at
all, and ended up with a much better understanding of how to take greater
advantage of features I've been using for years.

The book is also featured on Jean Hollis Weber's site
http://www.taming-libreoffice.com/2016/03/new-book-designing-with-libreoffice/
since she appears to be one of the editors/reviewers.

#2

Thanks for the kind words!

Jean commissioned the book through her nonprofit, Friends of OpenDocument. She
has also worked long hours to copy edit and proofread, and, more recently, to
promote. I couldn't have had a better editor, and the book is much improved
for her involvement.

#3

Hi Bruce!

how strange: I was wondering lately how your book was going...

The book is also featured on Jean Hollis Weber's site
http://www.taming-libreoffice.com/2016/03/new-book-designing-with-libreoffic
e/ since she appears to be one of the editors/reviewers.

Thanks for the kind words!

Jean commissioned the book through her nonprofit, Friends of OpenDocument. She
has also worked long hours to copy edit and proofread, and, more recently, to
promote. I couldn't have had a better editor, and the book is much improved
for her involvement.

I'm glad you had it put together. As already said, your book is really filling a big gap and shows the actual strengths of LibreOffice. This will tremendously help trainers introducing our office suite of choice in a very concrete manner.

I've placed an order for the printed book :slight_smile: and I am looking forward to get my hands on it. In the meantime, I've downloaded the ods files so that I can have a first look (I prefer printed matter when it comes to big documents; electronic version is, IMO, not very suited to thorough reading).

Thanks, thanks, thanks,
Keep on the very good job!
Greetings from the other side of the pond,

#4

This is my busy season at work so I haven't had a lot of time, yet, but I downloaded the PDF version and took a quick look at a couple of chapters I need the most. I'm quite impressed. Good job!

Dave Liesse

#5

An epub version would be nice. I find they work better on tablets than pdf.

#6

I hope an epub version is coming. However, porting highly-formatted material
to .epub format can be difficult, so it's going to take some time.

If anybody has any advice, I would appreciate hearing it.

#7

Re: James Knott's comment: I *generally* agree that text-centric e-pubs are a
better (or at least more flexible) choice on tablets, but Bruce's pdf
version seemed just fine to me (on a Galaxy 10-S) and I'm an old cranky
retiree with astigmatism and such.

I suspect that part of the reason for the aversion to pdfs on tablets is due
to poor layout or pdfs that are constructed from scanned pages (some
magazines just don't "get" how annoying low res page scans are).

Another issue is that the font sizes can be changed quite easily in e-pubs
which isn't an option with pdfs. So for smaller tablets (or are those
phones? I can't keep up), the pdf is less flexible.

I've published five books in the past few years that relied to one degree or
another on diagrams, charts, illustrations, etc. that need to have a
particular association with text elements. I've tried a number of supposed
solutions to converting those to e-pubs (there's even a LibreOffice
extension called Writer2xhtml export filters that purports to do this and
other conversions), but the whole concept behind "reflow" and other
underpinnings that make e-pubs so useful helps prevent them from being
adaptable for use with "formatted" documents.

As the author stated, if anyone has a good generic solution, I'd love to
hear it. I do believe, however, that if the original document is designed
reasonably well, and the pdf is produced with tablet reading in mind, it
remains the best choice for documents where illustrations are required.

Note for the author: One compromise I did make with one of my books was to
use a utility (e.g. pdf-shuffler in Linux or similar) that permits bulk
cropping of those portions of the margins that serve, as you described, to
provide space for binding on one side and hand holding or margin notations
on the other. This effectively magnifies the body text area for use on
devices like tablets where the readers usually offer space for holding and
permit note taking in software. In this manner, there only needs to be one
"source" pdf with another "trimmed" one which I simply name
filename-trimmed.pdf. I reduced all margins to a much smaller value, and
that actually worked quite well, although as someone in this thread said,
these sorts of publication work best as actual printed books.

-Frank

#8

Another point that is probably obvious to you, but may not be to some list
readers is that when anyone dealing with multiple formats of a long or highly
designed document wants to maintain as few formats as possible. At 90,000
words, reformatting a book separately several times can be prohibitively time-
consuming.

That's time that might be better spent on correcting typos and revisions on
fewer formats.

#9

Bruce Byfield wrote:

This is my busy season at work so I haven't had a lot of time, yet,
but I downloaded the PDF version and took a quick look at a couple of
chapters I need the most. I'm quite impressed. Good job!

An epub version would be nice. I find they work better on tablets than pdf.

I hope an epub version is coming. However, porting highly-formatted material
to .epub format can be difficult, so it's going to take some time.

If anybody has any advice, I would appreciate hearing it.

Calibre <http://calibre-ebook.com/> is an open source ebook manager which can import various formats, including ODT, and convert to various formats, including EPUB. I haven't used it much; about the most I've done is convert a couple of CHM (Windows help) files to AZW3 to read on a Kindle, which seemed to work reasonably well. On the Kindle, images are scaled to fit on the page, but a press-and-hold allows them to be enlarged to full screen and zoomed in further to see detail. I don't know how well it does with complex documents, but may be worth trying.

#10

I have used calibre to convert Getting Started with Base from ODT to ePUB format.

Dan

#11

Quoting Dan Lewis <elderdanlewis@gmail.com>:

Bruce Byfield wrote:

This is my busy season at work so I haven't had a lot of time, yet,
but I downloaded the PDF version and took a quick look at a couple of
chapters I need the most. I'm quite impressed. Good job!

An epub version would be nice. I find they work better on tablets than pdf.

I hope an epub version is coming. However, porting highly-formatted material
to .epub format can be difficult, so it's going to take some time.

If anybody has any advice, I would appreciate hearing it.

Calibre <http://calibre-ebook.com/> is an open source ebook manager which can import various formats, including ODT, and convert to various formats, including EPUB. I haven't used it much; about the most I've done is convert a couple of CHM (Windows help) files to AZW3 to read on a Kindle, which seemed to work reasonably well. On the Kindle, images are scaled to fit on the page, but a press-and-hold allows them to be enlarged to full screen and zoomed in further to see detail. I don't know how well it does with complex documents, but may be worth trying.

     I have used calibre to convert Getting Started with Base from ODT to ePUB format.

Dan

I used calibre just now to convert to epub. You can read it all right, but there's a lot of formatting that doesn't make it.

D

#12

Hi :slight_smile:
A few years ago the Documentation Team did a lot of trialling converters to
ePub format(s?) but none were quite up to the job.

At best quite a bit of tinkering had to be done before or/and after the
initial conversion. I'm fairly sure Dan was one of, quite possibly THE
main person, working on trying to get the conversions as smooth as
possible. For those who don't know, Dan has many years experience in the
professional publishing industry (as have many in the tiny Documentation
Team) as well as some really great work in the Documentation Team.

If anyone has had some success, particularly in the last couple of years,
in converting anything to ePub then right now could be a good time for 'us'
to have another bash at it.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: