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Second edition of Designing with LibreOffice available for free download

Designing With LibreOffice 2nd EditionBruce Byfield and Jean Hollis Weber announce the second edition of Designing with LibreOffice. The book is available as an .ODT or .PDF file under the Creative Commons Attribution/Sharealike License version 4.0 or later from https://designingwithlibreoffice.com/

The first edition was published in 2016, and was downloaded over thirty-five thousand times. Michael Meeks, one of the co-founders of LibreOffice, described the first edition as “an outstanding contribution to help people bring the full power of LibreOffice into their document.” Similarly, free software author and journalist Carla Schroder wrote, “Designing With LibreOffice teaches everything you need to know about document production…. suitable for beginners to wizened old pros, who will probably discover things about LibreOffice that they didn’t know.”

The second edition updates the original, removing outdated information and adding updated screenshots and new information about topics such as Harfbuzz font shaping codes, export to EPUB formats for ereaders, the Zotero extension for bibliographies, and Angry Reviewer, a Grammarly-like extension for editing diction. In the future, the writers plan to release other editions as necessary to keep Designing with LibreOffice current.

For more information or interviews, contact Bruce Byfield at bbyfield@axion.net.

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French translation of “Designing with LibreOffice”

Christophe Masutti has translated part of Designing with LibreOffice into French. Titled LibreOffice, c’est stylé !, the translation is available from this page.

The translator writes:

This adaptation of the book is both a translation and a free modification of the original version of Bruce Byfield. In addition to the translation of the majority of the passages, some of them were objet of modifications, following these principles:

  • adaptation to the latest version of LibreOffice (6)
  • removal of redundant or superfluous passages
  • additions and clarifications for certain procedures
  • deletion of some chapters

The original version deals with the use of the main components of LibreOffice: Writer, Calc, Draw and Impress. In this adaptation, I made the choice to focus the book only on Writer and the proper use of styles, without integrating chapters 12 to 15 of the original version. Similarly, some passages have been severely shortened.

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“Styles and Templates” extract published separately

Friends of OpenDocument has published Styles and Templates, the second of five extracts from Bruce Byfield’s Designing with LibreOffice.

Like Designing with LibreOffice, Styles and Templates is available as a free download from this page.

Printed copies are available from the Friends of Open Document store on Lulu.com.

Printed copies of the first extract, Choosing Fonts, are also available from Lulu.com.

Future extracts will be:

  • Character and Paragraph Styles
  • Frame, List, and Page Styles
  • Slide Shows, Drawing, and Spreadsheets

Downloads of the full book have exceeded 20,000 copies.
For more information, please contact bruce@designingwithlibreoffice.com or jean@designingwithlibreoffice.com.

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Released at Last

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:

Download / Buy

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.