Writer2LaTeX

March 22, 2013

So, it’s finally time to start typesetting my PhD thesis. I decided to go with LaTeX. Main reason: avoid format fuck-ups. The University of Oslo has their own PhD document class. The guidelines can be found here: http://www.mn.uio.no/ifi/tjenester/it/hjelp/latex/uiophd.html

Now, my supervisors are not really familiar with LaTeX, which makes it hard to collaborate on these documents. However, writing documents in LibreOffice Writer and then converting them to tex-files which can be linked together and compiled into one “thesis document” proved quite easy. I just installed Writer2LaTeX. Here is how I got it to work with LibreOffice (in Ubuntu):

  1. Download Writer2LaTeX extension from this place
    http://writer2latex.sourceforge.net/index11.html
  2. Install the downloaded extension in LibreOffice (Tools -> Extension Manager -> Add)
  3. I got an error message and it looked like it had something to do with Java, so I ran this line (in terminal) to install some missing packages
    sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-java-common
  4. Finally I enabled the Writer2LaTeX extension and now I’m all set.
    (BTW – If the extension doesn’t appear in the manager at this step, try installing it once again)

w2llogotransparent

If you’re an Ubuntu user like me – check out Gummi. Real neat for editing LaTeX.
http://dev.midnightcoding.org/projects/gummi