Episode: 1819
Title: HPR1819: LibreOffice Tips: Horizontal Lists and Headless Operation
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1819/hpr1819.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:41:27

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This is HBR episode 1,819 entitled, Libra Office Tips, horizontal lists and headless operation
and in part of the series, Libra Office. It is hosted by John Culp and is about 11 minutes
long. The summary is at work around to create horizontal ordered lists in Libra Office
and run a low headless to convert files.
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Hey everybody, this is John Culp and Lafayette Louisiana and I'm recording today an episode
about Libra Office. I do not presume to know as much about this as Ahuka does but there are
a couple of things that I've been meaning to talk about with respect to Libra Office that I'm
getting around to today. Finally, they've been on my to-do list for quite a long time so it's
time to knock it out. One of these things is how to create horizontal lists in Libra Office.
This is something that I wanted to do. I think it was maybe a year ago that I was really trying
to find out how to do this. What I mean by that is I wanted to be able to do in Libra Office the
equivalent of an inline list in HTML and CSS. There's a way in CSS to tell the browser to display
a series of list items in line rather than vertically. This is used all the time for
footers and headers and things of that sort. I wanted to be able to do that in Libra Office because
it would ease the process of creating the exams that I make in my classes where I have
a numbered list for all of the questions and the answers for each question are also done in a
numbered list but at the second level usually done with ABC and D whereas the numbers of the
questions are 1, 2, 3, 4 and so forth. What I wanted to be able to do was have the ordered list
ABCD spread out horizontally across the page without having to do it manually. So in other words,
I wanted to be able to type a word for an answer and then press enter and instead of having it
going to a new line have it simply move over to the right a little bit with a new letter in place
for the next item in the ordered list. I hope it's clear what I'm after here. Anyway,
I never did find a way to do this. I searched online and there were a couple of other people who
were interested in doing the same thing but they were all told this is impossible. Well, sort of,
I found a workaround for this and it's not all that elegant but in a pinch it could work and I
don't think I would want to do it for an entire test but I thought it was kind of cool
way to do it. So what you do is make up the ordered list just like you have. I have here on my
computer right now open a document with a single question question number one. What is your
favorite color and then it has at the second level of ordered list a series of four options. Red,
purple, green and blue and each one of these is in a font color of the same name. So the word red
is in red, the word purple is in purple, the word green is in green and I do this because it makes
it easier to see how these things move up and down. You may or may not have been aware that you can
move list items up and down in LibreOffice by, it seems like there's a keystroke too. I don't remember,
oh yeah, control alt up will move a list item up and control alt down will move it down. I'm going
to try moving. Actually, I didn't do it. I think it didn't do it on my computer because those
keystrokes are mapped to something else in open box. Anyway, there are little buttons down
at the bottom of the screen where if you click on the arrow up or the arrow down, it will move a
list item up or down. So if I, right now red is in the first position A. If I click the down arrow,
it will go down to the second position and the one that was formerly second is now first. So purple
and red have switched places and you can see this very easily not only because the words have
changed but the colors of switch places as well. And I want to have this kind of flexibility
going horizontally as well. And the way I found to do this was to make the list just like this
vertically and then select the four items starting with purple going down through red, green, and blue
and then under the format menu I choose columns and I tell it I want four columns because I have
four items and I click OK. And suddenly these things are distributed across the screen horizontally.
Right now they're a little bit spread pretty far apart and I don't know if I want that necessarily.
But so the cursor right now is at the very end on blue and I think I'm going to actually undo
this and I'm going to make a fifth column. I think I want five columns. I'll add one more color.
And when I press enter right now my cursor is in the fourth column at the end of the word blue
and if I press enter it will just go over to the next column and make a new num number but a letter.
It created instantly the letter E with a closed parenthesis after it and I'm going to type
the word orange. I'm going to I'm going to change the font color to reflect that. Is there an
orange in here? It's not a very good orange. I'll just do the best I can. But now I've got
straight across the screen purple, red, green, blue and orange that are automatically lettered A,
B, C, D and E. And right now my cursor is in the very last one orange and if I click the up arrow
it makes it move left one place and the one that was in the fourth position moves over to the right.
And then if I click it again it's suddenly in the third position. So this is one of the great
things about automatic numbering is the way you can instantly rearrange the list and have the
numbering correct itself. And so I wanted that flexibility and capability in my horizontal lists
as well. Right now I don't have it for my test but I know now that it is at least technically
sort of possible. The bad thing about using columns is that the columns are at least in this
by default they are of uniform width so they do not dynamically change according to the number
of characters that are in the word the way it would do in HTML with CSS. So anyway that is one of
the things I wanted to talk about today. The horizontal lists, a little hackish work around that I
came up with that's I don't know I think it's kind of a cool trick. Okay so I'm going to close
LibreOffice now because the other thing I wanted to tell you about requires that LibreOffice
be closed. Yeah I'm going to discard my changes. And the other thing I wanted to talk about was
something I discovered recently much more recently. And that is the ability to run LibreOffice
headless as a command line tool. So on a server or something like that. I found this I don't remember
exactly why I was looking at this or whether I was actually looking for or whether I just kind of
happened upon it. But I found out that you can use LibreOffice to convert documents from one
format to another at the command line. And it's a very simple command the command is LibreOffice
the entire word space double dash headless space double dash convert hyphen to space. And then
that's followed by the extension without a period that you want to convert it to or the the file
format that you want to convert it to followed by another space and then the file name that you're
working on. So I have here two examples. One is LibreOffice space double hyphen headless space
double hyphen convert hyphen to space ODT space voobar dot dot x. And then you can do the same thing
I have the same if I want to convert the same document to HTML from dot x instead of to open
document format I would instead of putting convert to ODT I would just put convert to HTML.
And the the output is I don't know it's okay going from dot x to HTML is always going to be
a little bit ugly and is going to need serious cleanup. And for that I would use a tool like
the web-based word to cleanhtml.com where you just paste the contents of a document in a little
window and then click convert to cleanhtml and it will strip out all the crappy inline style
formatting that is found in most word documents. But anyway this could be handy if you have a
whole lot of word documents that you want to convert to another format or even a whole lot of
open document formats that you want to convert to say files that you want to convert to HTML or
something like that. You could just set a server running to do it and let it go. It's certainly
much more efficient than opening up every single one and then choosing save as and then finding
the new format. So I guess that's about it for today horizontal lists and headless LibreOffice.
Hope you have found that useful and I will talk to you some other time. Bye.
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