Authors Offer Free Downloads for New Second Edition of 'Designing with LibreOffice' Book (designingwithlibreoffice.com) 36
He's been a contributing editor at the Linux foundation's Linux.com, a contributor to Linux Journal, and a blogger for Linux Pro magazine. Now Bruce Byfield has teamed with the lead editor for the Open Office authors volunteer group (who was also co-lead on Open Office's documentation project) to co-author a second edition of Byfield's book Designing with LibreOffice.
From the official announcement: The book is available as an .ODT or .PDF file under the Creative Commons Attribution/Sharealike License version 4.0 or later from https://designingwithlibreoffice.com. ["Under this license, you can share or copy the book, or even add to it," explains the book's site, "so long as you mention the writer's name and release your changes under the same license."]
The first edition was published in 2016, and was downloaded over thirty-five thousand times. Michael Meeks, one of the co-founders of LibreOffice, described the first edition as "an outstanding contribution to help people bring the full power of LibreOffice into their document...."
The second edition updates the original, removing outdated information and adding updated screenshots and new information about topics such as Harfbuzz font shaping codes, export to EPUB formats for ereaders, the Zotero extension for bibliographies, and Angry Reviewer, a Grammarly-like extension for editing diction.
In the future, the writers plan to release other editions as necessary to keep Designing with LibreOffice current.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader nanday for sharing the news.
From the official announcement: The book is available as an .ODT or .PDF file under the Creative Commons Attribution/Sharealike License version 4.0 or later from https://designingwithlibreoffice.com. ["Under this license, you can share or copy the book, or even add to it," explains the book's site, "so long as you mention the writer's name and release your changes under the same license."]
The first edition was published in 2016, and was downloaded over thirty-five thousand times. Michael Meeks, one of the co-founders of LibreOffice, described the first edition as "an outstanding contribution to help people bring the full power of LibreOffice into their document...."
The second edition updates the original, removing outdated information and adding updated screenshots and new information about topics such as Harfbuzz font shaping codes, export to EPUB formats for ereaders, the Zotero extension for bibliographies, and Angry Reviewer, a Grammarly-like extension for editing diction.
In the future, the writers plan to release other editions as necessary to keep Designing with LibreOffice current.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader nanday for sharing the news.
I can't (morally) read it... (Score:2)
...because it's a book entitled "Designing with LibreOffice" and it lacks basic book design:
1) I does *not* have justified paragraphs
2) Text body/margins page proportion is atrocious
3) The index I wrote when I was using typewriter were so much better than that...
etc.
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Re: I can't (morally) read it... (Score:2)
Re: I can't (morally) read it... (Score:4, Informative)
Why should the book be any different than the subject.
The book has a whole chapter producing indices in LibreOffice, yet the book does not have one. LibreOffice permits full justification, and the book is ragged right. Etc. etc. People can use tools poorly.
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Oh yeah, I loaded it up and... ugh. I've never been formally schooled in DTP software but I am the son of an award-winning graphic artist from whom I learned a thing or two, and whose Mac IIci I used to use Aldus Pagemaker on when she wasn't using it. And the formatting of this book is frankly terrible, it is not even up to my amateur early 1990s standards, let alone what I've done since (as for a while, I was employed as a graphic artist.)
Which brings me to my next point, if I want to do fancy design work
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I love good layout, whose principles I learned while manually designing flats for a newspaper in the late 80s.
I am no longer involved in design, but I do write books, and thus need to deliver mss. Presses always want as little mark-up as possible, but it's still important to work with styles and basic design elements such as tables of contents or graphics. MS Word excels in these things. I have tried OOo a few times, but have always ended up frustrated (esp. with its implementation of Tracking Changes). I'
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Hmm, as it turns out, Scribus can import the text gracefully enough but it has performance problems and still seems to lack text autoflow features that Pagemaker had back in the day. It's really still not up to handling a professional workflow. I could import a Word 5.1 document into Pagemaker on a 25MHz Macintosh with 5MB RAM and get better performance than this. Yowza. Guess it's still InDesign for any projects of consequence.
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Yes, it's atrociously designed. I cannot believe, though, that is due to the limits of LibreOffice.
It's not LibreOffice.
6x9 pages
12 point font
Huge margins
The ToC isn't LibreOffice's fault. I have no idea why he configured it that way.
I was ready to believe the naysayers were just being picky, but it looks like the way a kid would format a book report to make it look like it was a lot longer than it was. The problem is, someone will look at that and in the best case think, if this is the best this author can do, he has nothing to teach me about LibreOffice. That's the best case. The more likely option
Re:I can't (morally) read it... (Score:5, Funny)
The design of the book is left as an exercise for the reader. You download the .odt version, change the styles according to what you have learnt reading the book, export to pdf and submit back to the author to get your final grade.
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Perhaps, but I would think a book promoting the use of a tool should also show the tool off in a good way.
I mean, if you're going to use LibreOffice to lay out the text (and there are issues with that), you should also make it appear like a properly typeset product. So you can say
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That done, all my work is done with OO and produces perfectly fine ms. So I agree with most posts here, there's no excuse for the bad formatting and I can see it convincing others LO isn't that good a dea
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The design of the book is left as an exercise for the reader. You download the .odt version, change the styles according to what you have learnt reading the book, export to pdf and submit back to the author to get your final grade.
And you might get a tasty WFH offer out it too! /s
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If it were professionally formatted, it probably wouldn't be free. If it has an OSS-like license, you're free to clean it up yourself :-)
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What's so atrocious about the margins? There has to be room for trimming when the book is printed and bound.
I've seen quite a few printed books in recent years that eschew full justification. I think with the web publishing so prevalent---full justification looks terrible on most screens especially with sans-serif fonts---full justification has fallen out of favor even for printed books. And print books more and more are embracing light-weight, sans-serif fonts (like the one used in this book) which is
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Justification looks perfect both printed and on screen.
If the program does not do it *properly*, then it won't look good anywhere.
LibreOffice does *not* process properly justification (not even basis). Scribus does, for example.
I've found no book yet (and I own more than 6,500 printed ones in my personal library) that came with un-justified text.
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I know, it's like people think that everything is written in command line formatting or something then translated to the book format at print.
I write with full justification on and there's not a font it doesn't work with.
You're gonna have to elaborate. I've got my current ms up right now and it all looks fine and will look the same on output as it has before.
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Quote: "You're gonna have to elaborate" [on lack of proper justification in LO]
First, note that I'm used to work with LaTeX docs, also with publishing tools (Affinity Designer, Scribus, etc.)
What I meant with the lack of "basis" (sic) on justification is, for example:
1) you can not control the % of (de)compression in text to fix those "rebel" words that can't be broken in LO. That's a feature that even MS Word has but I haven't been able to find in LO.
2) Perfect widow/orphan paragraph justification. It's re
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Justified text was the style for many years—we grew up on it. But there has been a great deal of research on readability (how easy something is to read) and it shows that those disruptive, inconsistent gaps between the words inhibit the flow of reading. Besides, they look dumb. Keep your eyes open as you look at professionally printed work...and you’ll find there’s a very strong trend now to align type on the left and leave the right ragged.
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Only left unjustified might be fine if you're pumping out text for various online pubs where you have no knowledge of the frame size and want to flow text in vertical columns in various publications (guess what SEC produces most of?).
Think I'll follow these guys [practicaltypography.com].
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Quick review (Score:4, Interesting)
I just now downloaded the .pdf and scanned through. About 500 pages of well structured text and lots of images.
There is a lot of "this is how you activate this feature" showing the appropriate menus, but mixed with a lot of style and creative advice.
Randomly selected paragraph:
In the end, the Golden Section is a prestige ideal rather than a practical one – and one that not everyone believes is worth the effort of applying its elaborate theory. If you decide to use it, choose a thick, quality paper and a simple but elegant font for the body text of the document. Anything less seems out of place.
No reference to the program suite (at this point in the text), just advice on style based on the author's personal experience.
Looks like a good book for those interested in improving their creative ability.
Wrong tool (Score:1)
I don't think LibreOffice (or any word-processor) is a great tool for this. The docs I produce in LaTeX look better than the book, IMO, and I don't even worry about design because LaTeX and TeX take care of that, for the most part.
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Bad first impression (Score:2)
Ages ago, when OOoAuthors was founded, I was one of the contributors (for example, I designed the logo used by the project), I worked both with the book author and its editor. So I was curious a bit about it.Opening it, the first impression is bad: the very first part you see is the Table of Contents and it is badly formatted. So a book about design where the very first thing you see is badly designed. Embarrassing.
brilliant mistakes ... (Score:2)
Back at the beginning of time someone said, here use this "desktop publishing" software to write a memo.
It's easy someone said. Just press Ctrl-shift-f3 then Ctrl-alt-J, then shift-f7. Then type a bit, then alt-f5. Then ctrl-s. There !
Memo writers were thoroughly confused ever since.
It's like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly. Wrong tool for the use case. And the rest is history, as they say.
Corrections (Score:1)
Nice. Cute, needs some work, but nice. (Score:2)
Layout and typography is amateurish, but the basic premise is laudable, Modern office suites, and that includes Libre Office, are layout and design powerhouses if used correctly and I consider it a good thing if someone puts effort into raising awareness about that.
That book does need a redo of typo and layout though, but since it's open source and the ODT is right there, that might just happen in the next few days.
It takes a book (Score:2)
It takes a whole book to explain how to use the world's most byzantine UI.