[PLUG] Libre Office Writer Version: 5.1.6.2 and curly quotes

Paul DeStefano paul.destefano-plug at vfemail.net
Mon Aug 7 18:35:08 UTC 2017


On Sun, 6 Aug 2017 16:40, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Sun, 6 Aug 2017, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> 
> > I'll disagree with the suggestion to use Lyx, but only because Joe 
> > said that he needed to do college papers. For academic writing today 
> > you are in a world of pain doing citations and the references section 
> > unless you have either Zotero or Mendeley, and both work only with 
> > LO/OO or MS Word.
> 
> John,
>
>    I did not mean to be harsh in my response, but LaTeX/LyX and bibtex 
> (or biblatex) are very heavily used in academia. Take a look at it.

I can't resist chiming in here.  I also vote for LaTeX; it's amazing.  I 
think it's a steep learning curve, but I also think it will payed off for 
most people.  I started teaching myself two years ago and I love it. 
Feel free to contact me if you want to try.

LaTeX can be tricky, but it also does *all* the typesetting.  That's the 
idea: you focus on expressing your ideas, let the computer make the 
document.

There are a million templates on the web; you don't even have to learn it 
from scratch.

For one thing, I found beamer (a LaTeX document "class" for making 
presentations) to be *far easier* than LO Presentation, and, although I 
haven't used it in many years, I'm confident that applies to PowerPoint, 
too.  Beamer is a dream.  I made my first beamer in an hour and it was 
completely done, perfect.  No fussing with margins and other minutia.  So 
organized, so sensible, so good looking.  It literally makes some slides 
for you.

I have recommended to other people they try beamer as their first LaTeX 
experience.  Beamer takes your thoughts and makes presentations.  You 
don't have to think about margins or "master" slides.  LaTeX makes PDF 
files (and DVI and PostScript files, to be accurate), not .ppt or .odp. 
But, PDF supports lots of fancy things, today, so you shouldn't consider 
that a hindrance.  LaTeX cannot do all the fancy stuff in PDF, but beamer 
can make simple transitions, for example, so it's not so simple that 
you'll be disappointed, I think.

Plus, if you have used LO Presentation, before, then you know you cannot 
use your .odp file in PowerPoint at a conference or something--it never 
works right.  But you can make PDF work on *any* computer.

Regarding citations/reference, I want to plug Calibre.  Calibre is part of 
most Linux distros, is cross-platform (has Windows client), *and* exports 
bibtex .bib reference files (and many other citation formats).  I used 
this recently.  I just selected the "books" in my library I wanted, and 
exported a .bib file...bingo, my LaTeX paper had a reference list.  I've 
looked into Zotero and it creeps me out.  Go the OSS way, try calibre. 
Calibre is also supposed to work with ebook readers like Nook, Fire, 
Kindle, and Kobo, although I have had trouble with that on Linux.

In UNIX & GNU/Linux, there is more than one way to do everything.

-- 
Paul DeStefano



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