Comment by dizzystar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dizzystar | Hacker News Reader

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Try this:

The front page should not have a page number.

Please place a header on each page. On the even pages, the header should be on the left, on the odd pages, the header should be on the right. On the bottom-center of each page, place the page number, except for the front page, as specified above.

The above is probably a bit much, but it is, as far as I know, absolutely impossible to do in Libre Office, or it is not, it is extremely difficult to do, but this sort of formatting is absolutely trivial in MS.

If the above sounds to complex, then try creating a working TOC in Libre Office.

The grammar and spell-checking capabilities are not very good in LO.

I've also had many doc -> PDF conversion problems in LO. There are many other smallish issues.

LO is about as much of a replacement for MS Suite as Gimp is a viable replacement for Photoshop for productivity and real-world work. I use the FOSS stuff at home, but my overall productivity is way lower at home as well. I've ran into many things I simply cannot do. It really is a cost-to-productivity ratio here. MS Suite really isn't that expensive if you compare the speed and accuracy you can accomplish common tasks.

The front page should not have a page number.
Please place a header on each page. On the even pages, the header should be on the left, on the odd pages, the header should be on the right. On the bottom-center of each page, place the page number, except for the front page, as specified above.
The above is probably a bit much, but it is, as far as I know, absolutely impossible to do in Libre Office, or it is not, it is extremely difficult to do, but this sort of formatting is absolutely trivial in MS.

If the above sounds to complex, then try creating a working TOC in Libre Office.

... on the other hand, those are all trivial thing to do in LaTex. Maybe the problem is people using Libre Office for things which Libre Office is not designed to do?

You could do all of above in Word version 4.0.

Why isn't Libre Office designed to create a report which can be printed and bound? Seems like a basic word processing task.

When Word 4.0 was released, 99% of the documents it was used to produce were intended to be printed. These days, I doubt even 10% of Libre Office documents get printed. As people have gotten more comfortable with and more able to exchange documents electronically, the word processor using population has bifurcated -- 99% going into a group which produces documents for mainly-electronic circulation to a small set of people, and is not very concerned with presentation; and 1% going into a group which produces documents intended to be printed and circulated to wide audiences, and cares deeply about good presentation.

The first group is the Libre Office -- and Office 2013 -- audience, and they generally don't need to do anything sophisticated with headers, footers, and page numbers. The second group uses LaTex or Adobe InDesign or similarly more "sophisticated" software, which of course provides all the requires functionality.

Because none of the developers does that themselves, I suspect, and because said developers probably personally believe that paper is "obsolete" anyway so resist adding features like that when asked.

When launching LO Writer, one is presented with a virtual blank sheet of paper. The entire metaphor of the program is built around printing.

In any case, I have virtually no Libre Office experience, and I was able to generate dizzystar's test case in about 2 minutes. My apologies for leading us down this dead-end discussion. (The only confusing part was that you have to manually turn on headers & footers before you can click on them to edit.)

When it comes down to it, LO is probably not missing many features, but they haven't received the UI research/testing effort to make them accessible. The general look & feel is also 'old fashioned'.

It's not impossible at all, you just need page styles. Could it come with more document templates? Probably. But it's not impossible in the slightest.

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