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Comment by cobertos | Hacker News Reader

My favorite underrated feature is editing PDFs directly at the object level with LibreOffice Draw.

You can actually use this to import pdfs generated with Matplotlib as vector graphics into Impress presentations. This allows you to change, e.g., the color of lines or the legend (or any other part of the plot) right within Impress to better fit your presentation. I found this extremely useful in the past. In Powerpoint, I could not even import an svg, let alone a pdf (although maybe the newest version supports this?). The only downside is that currently you have to first import the pdf into Draw and then copy the shapes/curves over to Impress. I hope they will add direct import into Impress in the future.

Mine is that one where I can't open ODS documents if my printer is turned off.

I don't suppose you were trying to do something crazy like print on a Tuesday?

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...

Ha I saw that one when I was trying to work out why this wasn't working. Alas no nothing that good.

Turned out the issue was if you set a print range then it has to talk to the printer driver on windows and that takes forever to respond if the thing is a network printer and it's asleep. You open the ODS file it just hangs.

I'm not sure if they fixed it. It was reported on bugzilla and was rotting already for years. I got so annoyed with it and just thought fuck it and bought an Office license.

Edit: downvoted to -1. Stay classy HN. I need to get stuff done not bugger around with defects all day. Nothing wrong with that!

Don't stress. Like Whose Line Is It Anyway, "the points don't really count." :-p.

Ah I just get annoyed. You write up your genuine experience and it gets buried. That's not helpful to anyone. It's not helpful to the engineers on a project or the customers. But it validates someone's ego somewhere. It just seems so immature.

I'd rather there was no upvote or downvote at all.

> I'd rather there was no upvote or downvote at all.

You've had an account for 11 days, I'm not sure you've had enough experience to form a proper opinion on this. I feel like the upvoting/downvoting system helps a lot.

I’ve been here a long long time. Around 2009. Occasionally I walk away for a few months.

I was there when it wasn’t possible to criticise MSFT because of the second coming of Satya. I was there when Google did no evil. Now look where we are.

> a long long time. Around 2009.

Laughs in 4-digit Slashdot ID

Why the new a/c, then?

exactly. Don't remember a time that it was ever impossible to criticize microsoft either.

Well, I've had an account for over a year. I think that the voting system is not generally very good, as it is subject to the same ills as all other such systems. Productive comments with unpopular views inevitably get buried, especially on threads which touch anything to do with politics.

It gives me an indication of whether my comments please people or annoy them, and encourages me to keep the two in balance so that my karma stays level.

If you need to act like someone you are not we are missing out.

I offer no solution.

I have a theory that there's a limit to the human ability to be genuine, and "just be yourself" is not very meaningful, because all interpersonal communication is inescapably an act. Of course you can have sincere intent, and make a great effort to convey what you think is true, but this always has to be done in some kind of register, and so it's always a performance (however simple). Shrek tells us that ogres are like onions, but if you peel all the layers off an onion it vanishes.

Perhaps but maybe not haha

Beyond your current self you have room to craft the even greater art-work you aspire to become. The creative effort ideally captures the emotions and experiences.

You are your own composition.

Arguably, judging you should be a privilege reserved for people who know you.

Should civilized men engage in this assumption that everyone is easily understood entirely by written words or does the act describe how shallow the jury is?

I'm sure I have much to learn from people down voting my comments without saying anything.

If only we could all be more like them, then we wouldn't need to have these conversations. haha

You replied to someone's elation at an unexpected feature with snark based on a bitter experience, yes, you're going to get downvoted.

What is the bug number?

The upvote and downvote buttons are a couple millimeters apart on mobile and there's no feedback (that I've noticed, anyway) regarding which one you've pressed. There's probably a lot of accidental voting.

After you hit one of them, an 'undown' or 'unvote' button appears in front of the 'root' / 'parent' button

Oh it says "undown", that's good to know, I often worry I might have downvoted somebody by mistake. (Never done it deliberately.)

The vote button you press disappears, as well. I think this depends on some kind of local storage; it's often slightly out of sync.

Change your default printer to Microsoft Print to PDF (if you're on Windows) and it will fix the issue. But I agree, that bug is a huge pain in the ass.

That's my exact rationale for installing LibreOffice on a new Macbook. The performance on Apple silicon is very decent.

Instead of the increasingly uphill battle with Acrobat torrents and cracks, I am a happy LibreOffice user. Congrats Adobe, you won.

Congrats Adobe, you lost? (guess it depends on the pov, although I do think overall it's primarily a loss when a product is such a pain in the arse that ppl can't even be arsed to pirate it)

Their anti-pirating countermeasures won. I switched to LibreOffice

This is a great hack if you want to make some parody products and need to lift a vector logo of a brand.

Last time I tried that (6ish years ago maybe), I was glad I was able to but the interface was a pain to use. Hope it has changed for the better.

can do that with firefox now

I think in FF (and also Edge) you can only add text or drawings, you cannot edit existing text.

Excuse me what. I did not know it could do this I shall have to try it

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