Designing ebooks with free software

Bruce Byfield has written Designing ebooks with free software, which teaches several methods that help you to gain control over the creation of your ebooks. All it takes is two open-source tools that are free to download: LibreOffice and Calibre, plus some trial and error to get the precision and professionalism you want.

Designing ebooks is available as a free download in PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and ODT versions, as well as a low-priced print edition. Links to all versions are on the book’s website.

Designing ebooks is a companion volume to Bruce’s 2016 book, Designing with LibreOffice.

Four LibreOffice 7.1 user guides

So far this year the LibreOffice Documentation Team has produced four user guides for version 7.1: Getting Started, Writer, Calc, and Draw. They are available in free PDF, ODT, or to read in a browser, as well as low-cost printed copies. Visit the Documentation page on the website for links.

LibreOffice 7.0 Getting Started and Impress Guides

Two more volumes of LO 7.0 user guides were published in January: Getting Started Guide and Impress Guide. They are available in free PDF downloads and in low-cost print editions. See this page for links.

LibreOffice 7.1 Community released

On 3 February, The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 7.1 Community, the volunteer-supported version of the office suite. The Community label emphasises the fact that the software is not targeted at enterprises, and not optimised for their support needs. Blog post with more information.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF has strongly recommended the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners—for desktop, mobile and cloud—with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and other benefits. See LibreOffice in business.

Help for people still using Apache OpenOffice

Do you know someone who is still using Apache OpenOffice? Have they recently tried to open a .odt, .ods or .odp file and received this error message? “This document was created by a newer version of OpenOffice. It may contain features not supported by your current version.

AOO error message
The notice (pictured) that pops up in Apache OpenOffice doesn’t say so, but even the latest version of AOO (4.1.8, which was released earlier this month) does NOT support features like ODF 1.3, so updating to it won’t help. AOO users would need to “update” to LibreOffice. (LibreOffice users can avoid the problem for OO users by continuing to save files in ODF 1.2.)

Note: other features are lacking in AOO, for example the ability to save files in DOCX format, even though AOO can open DOCX files. LibreOffice can do both. Wouldn’t it be nice (helpful) if the “Update Now” button in AOO took a user to the LO download page?

See also this blog post at LibreOffice.