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109 lines
9.5 KiB
Plaintext
109 lines
9.5 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 1819
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Title: HPR1819: LibreOffice Tips: Horizontal Lists and Headless Operation
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1819/hpr1819.mp3
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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
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and in part of the series, Libra Office. It is hosted by John Culp and is about 11 minutes
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long. The summary is at work around to create horizontal ordered lists in Libra Office
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and run a low headless to convert files.
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This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
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Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15. That's HBR15.
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Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An honesthost.com.
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Hey everybody, this is John Culp and Lafayette Louisiana and I'm recording today an episode
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about Libra Office. I do not presume to know as much about this as Ahuka does but there are
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a couple of things that I've been meaning to talk about with respect to Libra Office that I'm
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getting around to today. Finally, they've been on my to-do list for quite a long time so it's
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time to knock it out. One of these things is how to create horizontal lists in Libra Office.
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This is something that I wanted to do. I think it was maybe a year ago that I was really trying
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to find out how to do this. What I mean by that is I wanted to be able to do in Libra Office the
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equivalent of an inline list in HTML and CSS. There's a way in CSS to tell the browser to display
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a series of list items in line rather than vertically. This is used all the time for
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footers and headers and things of that sort. I wanted to be able to do that in Libra Office because
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it would ease the process of creating the exams that I make in my classes where I have
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a numbered list for all of the questions and the answers for each question are also done in a
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numbered list but at the second level usually done with ABC and D whereas the numbers of the
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questions are 1, 2, 3, 4 and so forth. What I wanted to be able to do was have the ordered list
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ABCD spread out horizontally across the page without having to do it manually. So in other words,
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I wanted to be able to type a word for an answer and then press enter and instead of having it
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going to a new line have it simply move over to the right a little bit with a new letter in place
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for the next item in the ordered list. I hope it's clear what I'm after here. Anyway,
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I never did find a way to do this. I searched online and there were a couple of other people who
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were interested in doing the same thing but they were all told this is impossible. Well, sort of,
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I found a workaround for this and it's not all that elegant but in a pinch it could work and I
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don't think I would want to do it for an entire test but I thought it was kind of cool
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way to do it. So what you do is make up the ordered list just like you have. I have here on my
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computer right now open a document with a single question question number one. What is your
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favorite color and then it has at the second level of ordered list a series of four options. Red,
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purple, green and blue and each one of these is in a font color of the same name. So the word red
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is in red, the word purple is in purple, the word green is in green and I do this because it makes
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it easier to see how these things move up and down. You may or may not have been aware that you can
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move list items up and down in LibreOffice by, it seems like there's a keystroke too. I don't remember,
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oh yeah, control alt up will move a list item up and control alt down will move it down. I'm going
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to try moving. Actually, I didn't do it. I think it didn't do it on my computer because those
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keystrokes are mapped to something else in open box. Anyway, there are little buttons down
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at the bottom of the screen where if you click on the arrow up or the arrow down, it will move a
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list item up or down. So if I, right now red is in the first position A. If I click the down arrow,
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it will go down to the second position and the one that was formerly second is now first. So purple
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and red have switched places and you can see this very easily not only because the words have
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changed but the colors of switch places as well. And I want to have this kind of flexibility
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going horizontally as well. And the way I found to do this was to make the list just like this
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vertically and then select the four items starting with purple going down through red, green, and blue
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and then under the format menu I choose columns and I tell it I want four columns because I have
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four items and I click OK. And suddenly these things are distributed across the screen horizontally.
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Right now they're a little bit spread pretty far apart and I don't know if I want that necessarily.
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But so the cursor right now is at the very end on blue and I think I'm going to actually undo
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this and I'm going to make a fifth column. I think I want five columns. I'll add one more color.
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And when I press enter right now my cursor is in the fourth column at the end of the word blue
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and if I press enter it will just go over to the next column and make a new num number but a letter.
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It created instantly the letter E with a closed parenthesis after it and I'm going to type
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the word orange. I'm going to I'm going to change the font color to reflect that. Is there an
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orange in here? It's not a very good orange. I'll just do the best I can. But now I've got
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straight across the screen purple, red, green, blue and orange that are automatically lettered A,
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B, C, D and E. And right now my cursor is in the very last one orange and if I click the up arrow
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it makes it move left one place and the one that was in the fourth position moves over to the right.
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And then if I click it again it's suddenly in the third position. So this is one of the great
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things about automatic numbering is the way you can instantly rearrange the list and have the
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numbering correct itself. And so I wanted that flexibility and capability in my horizontal lists
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as well. Right now I don't have it for my test but I know now that it is at least technically
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sort of possible. The bad thing about using columns is that the columns are at least in this
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by default they are of uniform width so they do not dynamically change according to the number
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of characters that are in the word the way it would do in HTML with CSS. So anyway that is one of
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the things I wanted to talk about today. The horizontal lists, a little hackish work around that I
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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
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LibreOffice now because the other thing I wanted to tell you about requires that LibreOffice
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be closed. Yeah I'm going to discard my changes. And the other thing I wanted to talk about was
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something I discovered recently much more recently. And that is the ability to run LibreOffice
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headless as a command line tool. So on a server or something like that. I found this I don't remember
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exactly why I was looking at this or whether I was actually looking for or whether I just kind of
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happened upon it. But I found out that you can use LibreOffice to convert documents from one
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format to another at the command line. And it's a very simple command the command is LibreOffice
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the entire word space double dash headless space double dash convert hyphen to space. And then
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that's followed by the extension without a period that you want to convert it to or the the file
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format that you want to convert it to followed by another space and then the file name that you're
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working on. So I have here two examples. One is LibreOffice space double hyphen headless space
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double hyphen convert hyphen to space ODT space voobar dot dot x. And then you can do the same thing
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I have the same if I want to convert the same document to HTML from dot x instead of to open
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document format I would instead of putting convert to ODT I would just put convert to HTML.
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And the the output is I don't know it's okay going from dot x to HTML is always going to be
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a little bit ugly and is going to need serious cleanup. And for that I would use a tool like
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the web-based word to cleanhtml.com where you just paste the contents of a document in a little
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window and then click convert to cleanhtml and it will strip out all the crappy inline style
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formatting that is found in most word documents. But anyway this could be handy if you have a
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whole lot of word documents that you want to convert to another format or even a whole lot of
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open document formats that you want to convert to say files that you want to convert to HTML or
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something like that. You could just set a server running to do it and let it go. It's certainly
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much more efficient than opening up every single one and then choosing save as and then finding
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the new format. So I guess that's about it for today horizontal lists and headless LibreOffice.
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Hope you have found that useful and I will talk to you some other time. Bye.
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You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio dot org. We are a community
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