LibreOffice to LyX

[Virgil Arrington]

On 10/6/2021 11:14 PM, Steve Litt wrote:
> After importing my 300 page book from MS Word to LibreOffice, I
> looked extensively in the menu system, in the help docs, and on the
> Internet to resolve my magically changing styles problem, all to no
> avail.
>
> LibreOffice is just fine if you don't use styles, but who would not use
> styles when working with a large document?
>
I can't deny your experience, I think you may be unfairly blaming 
LibreOffice's and its styles.

I don't think the problem was with LibreOffice or with the size of your 
book. I think your problem lay in trying to import a styled 300 page 
book from Word to LibreOffice. Something always gets lost in translating 
documents between two programs. I have this happen to me even with 
unformatted text in different plain text editors if they are using 
different encoding.

Before my retirement, I was a practicing lawyer, and I often had to 
share documents with people who created or edited them on different 
systems, whether Word, WordPerfect or something else. If I was 
responsible to produce the final output, I learned to strip all 
formatting from the document and apply my own styles from scratch. I 
never had a problem with that method. Yes, it was time consuming, but it 
always worked, no matter how large the document. In reality, a MS Word 
paragraph style works differently from a LO Writer style. I learned 
that, to be truly compatible, I had to not only use the same program as 
my colleague, but also the same version. This is even true with 
different versions of LyX. Every new release seems to change the source 
file format just enough that earlier versions of LyX have trouble 
reading documents created with later versions.

LibreOffice's styles work just fine, even with large documents. I have a 
108 slide Impress presentation that works perfectly. But, I created and 
edited that file on LibreOffice; I wouldn't dream of trying to import an 
MS PowerPoint file into Impress without having problems, just as I would 
never dream of importing an Impress file into PowerPoint without problems.

Virgil