After seventeen years of frustrated ambition, three years of work, five drafts, and countless nights whimpering into my pillow as I tried to find a structure, I am delighted and relieved in equal measure to announce the release of my new book, Designing with LibreOffice. Released under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, it can be downloaded as a PDF from:
Hard copies are also for sale.
Designing with LibreOffice started as a book explaining how to use styles and templates to get the most from the application. However, like The Lord of the Rings (if less imaginatively), it grew in the telling, becoming an explanation of how to apply modern design standards to LibreOffice documents – with design defined in the broadest sense, not as format that calls attention to itself like an HTML blink tag, but as format that makes a document attractive, and easy to read, revise, and maintain.
In the coming months, the book will be released in five smaller sections, for readers with specific interests.
My thanks to my publisher, Friends of OpenDocument, and my editor, Jean Hollis Weber (aka, the main resource for LibreOffice documentation), my advance readers Michael Mann, Marcel Gagne, Carla Schroder, and Lee Schlessinger, and to Sara Paley Photography for author photos. Collectively, you’ve helped me to accomplish what I have wanted ever since the days of LibreOffice’s proprietary ancestor StarDivision, and never managed by myself.
