Are you using LibreOffice 4.4?

[Pinkie]

Edited to amend the version. I'm actually using 5, not 4.4!
Well, I gave it a great try. I worked really hard at it, because the reviews are stellar. But LibreOffice just doesn't cut it as a word processor. The Track Changes are much improved, and I might use it to edit, but nothing else.
I used it to write a novella from scratch, so no "taint" from another program. I used more than one computer to write it, because I was on the road for part of the time. So it's not the computer, it's not bringing over unwanted elements from another program.
I was a Word writer for many years, but I don't want to rent my software, and the outright price is prohibitive, so now my 2010 subscription is running out, I need to find another way. I know my way around computers and various word processing programs.

Here's why I can't take it any more.
1. Capitalization. It's truly horrible. If you start a sentence with a contraction, like I'm or Don't, it doesn't capitalize the word. The only way around it is to type the first letters before the apostrophe, backspace and then type the rest. Nope. Not doing that through a manuscript. I tried writing a macro to alter the behavior. More about macros below. Yes, I know I can use the shift key, and if it was that alone, I could cope with that. But it's not.
2. Capitalization part two. If you start a sentence with double quotes, ie dialogue, then it doesn't capitalize the first word. Okay, I can handle that, Word doesn't do that either, but the macro I wrote in Word is rock solid, and I can clear that up with the press of a button. That doesn't work in LO. If you end a sentence with a quote, and put the punctuation inside the quote, it doesn't capitalize the first letter of the next sentence.
3. Styles. LO arbitrarily changes Styles through a document, and language, if you use more than one language. I write some novels in UK English and others in US English. I set a style for the main body of text, and later on in the page find that I've somehow transitioned to a new style that I didn't want. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for this, and I can't change it, though I've tried, including trying to restrict a document to a limited range of styles. Nope, it doesn't like that.
4. Macros. I have a big set of macros that I wrote in Word. I'd have to rewrite all of them for LO. Kill me now. I tried, wrote a few and they worked fine. Then I closed the document, went back to it the next day, and they didn't work any more, or worked erratically. If I could get the macros to behave, I could get LO Writer to behave the way I want it to, but I'm tired of writing the same macro numerous times, only to have it fail the next time I open the document. There is no way to import the Word macros I've built. I did, reluctantly, install JRE, but that didn't make any difference. They still didn't work.

That's why.
If anybody has any suggestions that don't include me breaking my work flow to learn new habits, like the backspace thing, please let me know. There have been so many great reviews of this software, that I don't know what is going wrong here. Or is this usual for LO?
At the moment, I'm thinking of Scrivener, just for the word processor (I don't like the bells and whistles they provide as well, I use OneNote for most of that), or SoftMaker. Any more ideas? I don't ask for much, just a word processor that works properly, and is compatible with Word which is industry standard.

[cvkemp]

Why are you using libreoffice 4.4, 5.0 is out and it is great.

[Pinkie]

Sorry, yes, I checked the version, and the one I'm trying to evaluate is 5. I'm using it on Windows 10. It's dreadful, the worst text editor I have tried so far. I thought, with all the reviews, it might be just me, and I had a setting wrong or something.
Can you replicate what I outlined on your copy? Capitalization, macro failures and the arbitrary switching of Styles?
I just found out that it got rid of some of my italics, too.

[gmw]

Hmm... I wonder if v5 has some problems. I'm still on v4.2 and never had any capitalisation problems, nor anything unexpected with styles. It has always seemed to me to be very similar Word. I was never a Word fan (I came from WordPerfect) so didn't have a big investment in Word anyway. I only ever used Word when forced to by work for clients, but these days LibreOffice has good enough Word compatibility that I don't even have Word installed.

The macro thing I can see as being a problem if you have a lot of them, but I suspect it's one you are going to face with any change away from Word. You may have to put up with it as part of the cost of migration. Any change of product is going to involve some additional learning and probably some changes to your habits - this inertia is one of the things that keeps people tied to particular products even when they're not entirely happy.

These days I tend to be more conservative with my software updates. I won't be trying LO v5 until v5.1 or later. It's not as though I'm actually looking for new features, so I'm in no rush.

Long story short: I'm not able to offer much help, sorry.

[cvkemp]

I am using 5 and I am not having any issues. It is so much better than Microsoft office. Now with that said I am not a writer so I am not trying to publish articles. But I love the fact that I can save directly to pdf.

[Pinkie]

I tried LO first when it was 3. but back then it didn't talk to Office well at all, so I went back to Word.
This time I started with V4.4 and upgraded to 5, hoping it would solve some of the problems, but it didn't. If anybody could tell me how to solve these problems, I'd happily go back to LO. I'd rewrite the macros - if they worked once I'd done it, but I recorded two very straightforward macros and neither of them work properly. When they're recorded, they work fine, but close LO, open it again, and they're erratic. One (the one to capitalize the first letter in a sentence) only works a bit, and the other (to change the background color of instances of a certain word) doesn't work at all. It looks as if it is, but there's no change to the document.
I'm looking at Softmaker and WPS now, and they seem to be better suites, with a better compatibility with Word. Word is industry standard, so like it or not, I'm going to come into contact with it at some point, and I need a program that works with it seamlessly.
Scrivener's word processor doesn't have macro capability, but it displays expected behaviours, and it's consistent.
I've used the program on Windows 8.1, and now on Windows 10, on two different computers. No change.

[PeterT]

Funny. I just tried LO 5 and I do get auto capitalization of I'm and Don't at the start of a sentence.

[Pinkie]

With curly apostrophes? Because it will work with straight ones, but I use curly ones. It doesn't seem to work with those.
I've solved the language problem, one of my main concerns, by writing styles and baking in the language. That seems to keep them consistent. So one of my problems is now solved!

[gmw]

Originally Posted by Pinkie

With curly apostrophes? Because it will work with straight ones, but I use curly ones. It doesn't seem to work with those.
I've solved the language problem, one of my main concerns, by writing styles and baking in the language. That seems to keep them consistent. So one of my problems is now solved!

I tried the following in LO v4.2

[d] [o] [n] [insert character dialogue, choose U+2019] [t] [space]

This did NOT result in capitalisation. U+2019 is known as the "right single quotation mark". This is (apparently) the preferred UNICODE character for the apostrophe and you are right, it doesn't work well for an apostrophe in LO, probably because it is being processed as a right-single-quotation-mark (even though I have automatic replacing of single quotes turned off).

Note that this alternative does work:

[d] [o] [n] [insert character dialogue, choose U+02BC] [t] [space]

'd' turned into 'D' with no problems. Note that U+02BC is known as the "modifier letter apostrophe" and is generally considered part of the word (unlike quotation marks), and LO's treatment reflects that.

Do a search for "2019" (without the qoutes) in this list to see what Unicode has to say: http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamesList.txt


From what you say, Word must have found some way to resolve the dichotomy between the two roles that U+2019 must play (maybe an option somewhere?). Treating it as part of the word will have other impacts on the text. Have you searched LO and OO forums on this topic?

[Pinkie]

Wow, that 02BC thing works! Thanks!

[gmw]

No problem. Note that this will probably affect your spell-checker. I notice on my system that U+2019 is seen as equivalent to a straight apostrophe, while U+02BC causes the word to be marked as misspelled.

Note, too, that if you (or whoever produces the final published result) are at all concerned about using U+02BC rather U+2019 for apostrophe, it should be simple and reliable to do a change-all at the end - in the meantime it looks right while you're working. I still use the straight apostrophe while I type, but the same logic applies; because I don't use it for anything else a change-all is all that's needed to go curly.

[Pinkie]

Amazing, thanks!

[gmw]

You got me curious about some of this (and any distraction is a good distraction ), and I found a few things.

Take a look at the LO v5 release notes here. Near the top, about Writer, is a section "Emoji and in-word replacement support". It offers an interesting way to insert Unicode characters. I found it because one example is:

:': → ’ (apostrophe, U+2019)

Obviously you could do that with U+02BC too.

And while browsing I found this: Which Unicode character should represent the English apostrophe? (And why the Unicode committee is very wrong.)

And only partly relevant, but I thought interesting, was Being an Apostrophe. In particular:

The apostrophe is not a punctuation mark. It doesn’t punctuate. Punctuation marks are placed between units (sentences, clauses, phrases, words, morphemes) to signal structure, boundaries, or pauses. The apostrophe appears within words. It’s a 27th letter of the alphabet. This issue concerns spelling.

[Pinkie]

Interesting! If I can get macros to behave properly, I can probably solve the whole thing with the click of a button. Now I know what's going on, I can begin to work with it and see what I can do. I could do an autocorrect to change them as I type, but that would need a space, so it probably won't work. That would be why LO doesn't capitalize after double quotation marks, either.
Some word processors, like Word, the processor that comes with Scrivener, and Softmaker's Textwriter, capitalize contracted words with no problem. I wonder if something could be built in to LO to do the same thing? Because grammatically, that is the correct construct. A period, followed by a pair of closing quotation marks, is the end of a sentence, although a question mark or exclamation mark followed by the quote marks isn't necessarily the sentence's end. I did write a macro to deal with that one, but it's not working properly. I think it may be something to do with the language inconsistency, but I've discovered that if I bake the language into the Style, that works much better.
The Unicode committee should take a look at the Chicago Manual of Style sometime, otherwise known as the Editor's Bible (in the US, anyway!)

[gmw]

Note that for the new "Emoji" stuff the release notes say: "The colon-separated names are handled specially by AutoCorrect feature of LibreOffice: they are replaced immediately within words, too (no need to press space after words)."

Since I don't use v5 yet I can't confirm, but it might be useful. I've only ever done a few macros with OO/LO - they do seem like a lot more hard work than they should be.

ETA: I touch-type, something I was taught at high school - and all us boys said "Erk! That's girls stuff." but it's turned out to be one of the more useful things I got from high school. The point being that I tend not to rely on autocorrect a whole lot, and bits of it I turn off as annoying and distracting. However, if you like that sort of stuff you might find it worth your while wading through the big collection of add-ons and pre-written macros etc.. (Don't forget that many of the old OpenOffice macros will work too.) If nothing else the pre-written macros can make useful examples.