Overlooked

 

 

While the thought of learning LaTeX to write my encryption paper was a decent idea, the fact is that I don't want to spend the next 6 months learning to format something which is already written.

I will at some stage delve deeper in LaTeX, its formatting is very professional and looks good, especially for an academic paper. What I need at this point in time is an approachable modern text that I can work on without needing to learn something from scratch. Enter LibreOffice. I've used various components of this office suite before and I'm comfortable using it. I took time over the past weekend to explore its capabilities in depth to see if it could produce the kind of document that I want. The good news is that it is more than capable and I only have a few new things to learn.

I suppose that unless one uses office software on a daily basis its many abilities aren't often noticed. One uses it on a basic level using only the features that one needs and nothing else. When it comes to producing something a little more refined, something that is consistent throughout and designed well LibreOffice doesn't, for me at least, spring to mind. I would have thought that a DTP package might have been better suited to the task. My paper has a lot of tables and the ability to edit them in place is just one feature that I didn't know LibreOffice could perform. It's an extremely useful attribute.

I am now designing, correcting and formatting my document in the small amount of free time I have to do this work. LibreOffice has made that small amount of time much more productive.