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.
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