Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Shout out to Nareed who asked so nicely for this, saying LaTeX is too difficult.
I am no expert at document writing (can confirm - Ronnie), but I can pass on some tips and tricks to get you going. (Maybe from 0-20, not sure if these will get you to 60, hahaha).
1. Mouse clicks (these are in rapid succession):
When you click your mouse on a word, the ‘i-beam’ places your cursor, that flickering line. When you click twice, it highlights the word. When you click three times, it highlights the sentence. When you click four times, it will highlight the paragraph, allowing you to easily copy / paste large sections of text. Clicking five times wraps you around to one click again. To select, say, three lines, place the cursor at one point and shift+click the next point three lines down. (This works in reverse as well.)
2. Formatting:
Sometimes we need to highlight certain words or underline any of the standard formatting options, you know, the CTRL key shortcuts, like CTRL+I to get Italics and others. The thing is, sometimes you want to do the same thing to lots of words to make them stand out. One in this paragraph, three in another, four in the next and so forth. That would be the paintbrush icon.
Highlight the word with your style, click the paintbrush and paint the ‘style’ you want and apply it somewhere else, instead of applying bold, italics, underline, whatever, to each word in the document, paint it on them.
3. Images:
There are numerous memes on the internet about Microsoft Word messing up your image alignment / placement in a document. This behaviour is also present in LibreOffice Writer. When you plan on inserting an image, then add newlines, about the height of the image and paste the image at the beginning of this space. You will not end up typing beside the image or pressing enter below the image and the whole thing moves down and the other weird behaviours. (You can always delete blank lines up to your image afterwards without the image moving.)
4. Formatting:
If something does go out of alignment or something is not looking 100%, you need to look for the formatting icon. Some say it looks like a Roman column, others say it looks like a reversed ‘P’. Either way, when you press it, you can immediately see spaces marked with a dot, making it easy to spot double spaces, or the icon we described marking paragraphs, or a right-arrow indicating a tab, basically any formatting signs you don’t usually see when typing. The human eye is great at finding patterns and you should be able to see why your document looks funny or misaligned in an instant.
5. Copypasta:
If you need to copy and paste from a web page or another document, you may find that it pastes more data than you thought you copied. Right click, paste special, unformatted text, will put it in the same format as the document is already in. However, some web pages insert sneaky hidden nonsense into their text, and because LibreOffice Writer will take it all, trying to be helpful, you may need to paste it into a text pad first, and then re-copy it to paste, as a text pad will not paste all the hidden HTML and formatting.
6. End of page:
Sometimes you reach the end of a page, press enter a few times to go to the next page and soldier ahead. Now you realise that you need to insert more text before and now it pushes the bunch of newlines down, moving the next page down as well. If you want to end a page before it actually ends, insert a page break, by pressing CTRL+Enter (Return) and LibreOffice Writer will whizz to the next page for you, but the white space in between will have no formatting, if you turn on the formatting marks, allowing you to safely insert more text later, without the next page moving down.
7. Special characters:
Special characters are tied to the font you are using. If you do not find your special character, change the font in the dropdown list of the special characters (Omega icon) under “More Characters”. For instance, I like using the Ubuntu mono font, but when I need to add, say, the Cyrillic thousands, it is not there, then I switch to Roboto font, choose the Cyrillic subset and my special character is there.
8. Printing:
If you print your document and it does not sit right on the page, or prints another blank page you do not have, you need to check that the page properties match that of your document. The A4 / letter mixup is very common. You can access the page setup by clicking the small arrow in the margin on the right, if it is hidden, then selecting the page icon, to format your page.
9. Distortion:
Sometimes LibreOffice Writer will completely mess up a font, making you think that you did something wrong, like select the wrong font. Simply select the whole document or paragraph where the error occurred and change the font size, then press CTRL+Z to undo the change and the artifact should be gone. You can also try increasing the font size and decreasing it:
(lucky for me, it did it, whilst I was preparing this article, those three lines look atrocious!)
10. Keyboard:
My final tip is to learn the basic keyboard shortcuts, CTRL+P, CTRL+E, F-keys, and the like. This will speed up your document making quite a bit. Just hover over the icons in your menus, and, if there is a shortcut, it will be in the description.