On Wed, 12 Aug 2020 at 11:51, William Oliver <vendor@billoblog.com> wrote:
Wow.  I didn't know people still used TeX/LaTeX a lot any more.  I
remember having to use it all the time for stuff I wrote when in
graduate school in the 1980s, but I thought it had pretty much fallen
out of favor except for die-hard users.  I haven't used it in years.
But what do I know.  I still remember (and pine for) the keystroke
commands for WordStar.

I installed an old copy of Wordstar in the 1990's for use by visitors
from Japan who came with Wordstar documents.  We added TeX
or LaTeX markup (LaTeX was a bit much for 8086 MSDOS systems).


From reading this discussion, it seems that the primary complaints
against LibreOffice are larger scale layout issues.  I may have missed
it, and if someone has mentioned it earlier, I apologize. What about
just importing into a publishing/layout program like Scribus?  It seems
that this would make it trivial to do various orientations, etc.  Of
course, just as word processing programs are not the best desktop
publshing systems, the desktop publishing apps tend to make poor word
processors...

Another possibility might be to import the odt file into Libreoffice
Draw and use that for layout changes.

Document creation has many use cases, with the result that there are
many good specialized tools.  Problems can be expected when
you try to abuse an application to handle a use case that is outside
the app's wheelhouse,. One reason a use case is fails on a given
app is that people who have the same use case are working with
a different app.  If you can find examples from a similar use case,
you may be able to ask the authors which app they like.  

--
George N. White III