[libreoffice-users] RE: LibreOffice to LyX

On October 3, Steve Litt<mailto:slitt@troubleshooters.com> (on the LyX User List) wrote:

> Several times, on long wordprocessing documents, I personally have had
> LibreOffice writer styles spontaneously change. At one point my
> personal problem with LibreOffice style prevented me from converting a
> 300 page doc made in MS Word to LibreOffice. The import went just fine,
> but the styles kept changing, and keeping them all intact was like
> playing whack-a-mole.

> I had an even worse personal failure involving changing styles in
> LibreOffice's Impress, which contained the 90+ slide presentation I
> license to companies for their internal Universal Troubleshooting
> Process course, that now I need to rewrite the entire thing in Beamer.

At the risk of joining in a flame war, I feel a need to share my experiences with LyX and 
LibreOffice. As I am on both LyX’s and LibreOffice’s user lists, I am posting this message to both 
lists.

I have used both LyX and LibreOffice for decades, the former going back to version 1.4 and the 
latter going back to its origins as StarOffice and later as OpenOffice.org. Over the years I have 
found myself having a love/hate relationship with both. I have had to learn that each has its own 
way of working, and when I try to make either work like the other, I run into problems.

My current work is primarily with slide presentations, and I bounce back and forth between 
LyX/Beamer and LO Impress (as well as RMarkdown/Slidy/Ioslides). I have found that with LyX, I can 
very happily change formatting after composing my content and, so long as I am satisfied with 
Beamer’s slide designs and themes, it works very well. But, I usually find myself getting very 
frustrated when I want to change some design detail. It often requires a Google search to learn the 
right LaTeX command to achieve the change I want. After spending hours trying to achieve a certain 
result and editing preamble and/or LaTeX code, I often find I just give up and move it all to LO 
Impress just to get the job done.

On the flip side, I have had to learn that LO Impress doesn’t like having slide formats changed 
*after* the presentation substance has been composed. While my styles haven’t suddenly changed on 
me, I have learned that changes made to Impress master slides do not always get to all slides in a 
presentation. Through painful experience, I have learned that, if I ever make any direct changes to 
a particular slide’s format, it seems to disassociate that slide from the master slide. So, after 
hours of composing and wrestling with Impress’s master slides trying to get it all to behave, I 
find I often just give up and move it all to LyX/Beamer just to get the job done.

And in those cases where my slide design needs are particularly simple, I run to Rstudio and Slidy 
to create a quick and dirty (and well behaved) slide presentation.

And, so I bounce back and forth between the programs using the one that will let me get the job 
done efficiently. I find they all require considerable commitment of time and effort to achieve the 
desired results. Each has some feature I find maddening and each has some feature I find 
indispensable. In short, despite my obsessive search for the perfect document processing system, I 
have learned it doesn’t exist. I will continue to use whatever tool best meets the need at hand. 
Sometimes it’s LyX, sometimes it’s LibreOffice and sometimes it’s
RMarkdown.

Virgil

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