Setting Defaults

users
#1

Hi All

I have a MAJOR problem setting some defaults in LibreOffice!!

The first one is the Default Font - I have battled with this for some time now and discussed it on the Forum and tried ALL the suggestions but can not get rid of 'Liberation Serif' as the default!! This should be a quick change in the 'Tools > Options' Menu but it is not!!
Why is this so difficult and how do you do it??!!

Second in the last few days on a new fresh install of LibreOffice' on another machine I find the Page Size is set to 'Letter" an American standard not used by the rest of the World!! How do you change this to 'A4"?? Again it should be a basic change in the same 'Options' Menu like most other Programs have.

In both cases I'm working with LO ver 5.3.0.3 both running PClinuxOS 64-bit.

Any help would be appreciated.

IanW
Pretoria RSA

#2

​I don't know if this qualifies as "difficult", ​but it requires you to
change your "default" template.
If it's the first time, since you likely can't edit the hardcoded one,
you'll have to create a new, editable template. The easiest way to do this
is to edit the default one.

- Open the template manager: on the welcome screen click on the arrow
besides "Templates", then select the manage templats option
- Right click on the default template, then "edit".
- At this point, the template is read-only; click the button on top to
enable modifications

​You can now modify everything you want. In you case, you want to look at
the "Default Style" style to change most of the fonts. But note that some
styles (maybe headers, I'm not sure) define their own fonts, so you might
want to change them too.

Same thing apply to the page style. You can edit the "default page" style,
or create a new one and change it there.

Finally, you have to save your new template (menu File -> Templates -> Save
as template). At this point, you'll see a checkbox to make this the new
"default" template. If you check it, every new document created without
manually selecting a template will use this one.

As a side note, it might be more interesting to actually not save this new
template as the default one, and to manually choose it from the list of
available templates; this gives greater flexibility, and allow having
multiple templates for different situations (beside styling, you can also
put text in a template, etc.).
​

#3

Hi Ian,

Since there is nothing difficult about changing either the default font
or the default page size, I can only guess that your user profile has
been corrupted in some way, Assuming that you update using the
LibreOffice Manager script, your existing profile settings will not be
changed by the update in any way.

While I prefer to set most of my writer preferences by adjusting my
default template, I can easily set and keep the fonts selected in the
global "Tools > Options.." configuration. Page size seems to be
automatically selected according to your locale (eg. AU, ZA, GB, etc.)
even when you install the US edition.

Yesterday I used LibreOffice Manager to get LO 5.3.2.2 and all my
settings (ie. Liberation Sans & A4 ) are still the same as before the
update.

Just for fun I grabbed the latest PCLinuxOS64 KDE5 2017.04 Desktop,
dumped it into a VM with the locale set to en-ZA, updated to LO 5.3.2.2,
changed the global default font to Liberation Sans. This now has pretty
much the same default font and page size as my real en-AU system.

If your issue is caused by a corrupt user profile it's relatively simple
to close any instance of LO, rename your profile and when you restart LO
it will automatically create a new profile for you.
See: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/UserProfile
If this does not resolve one or both issues, you can delete the new
profile and rename the old one beck to the default.

Hope this helps.

Dave

#4

*Thanks Cley*

That did it for me - It was not the 'Local' or the 'User Profile' that was out - but thanks to others for the suggestions!!

It was just the convoluted (IMHO) way that LO works to achieve this.
I my World I would suggest that a better way to do this is to have a "Default" set of settings, (that you change in Preferences), and these are how the Program _always_ starts up. Then if you need special Templates you select this after the Program is started and they over ride the Default.

Just my Penny/Cent's worth!! But at least I've solved this problem that has bugged me for a long time!!

So thanks to all

IanW
Pretoria RSA