Posted inExperience / Information Technology

Speeding Up Libre Office 6

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek
Old Letters and Quill

I’ll never understand what goes through the minds of those who plan LibreOffice. I guess they wish to size it to run on an idiot phone instead of a real computer. Maybe they are chasing the Raspberry Pi market trying to make everything work in under 2Gig of RAM. They are really killing the desktop market doing that.

Featured image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Big Files = Big Problems

This weekend I started applying the first round of edits to The Minimum You Need to Know About the Phallus of AGILE. It’s just under 600 pages with some pictures and drawings in it. Not an overly burdensome book by any means. It’s even got a small novel page size instead of the page size used for my The Minimum You Need to Know series. Still, by the time I had scrolled 300 pages into the thing, edits were getting really sluggish. Actual typing was still speedy, but mouse movement and selection by any means were seconds delayed. It got to be most annoying last night.

Lots of sites selling advertising claiming to have LibreOffice speed up information. Most of it horribly out of date, if it ever worked at all. First off, you need to ask yourself, “Can you speed LibreOffice up?” If you are on a Raspberry Pi with 2Gig of total system RAM, be happy it even loads. Just forget about other forms of happiness. This desktop computer, however, is not constrained.

system info

You will note it has nearly 12Gig free. I haven’t looked under the hood of LibreOffice, but, I would think in an age of C++ with dynamic string and text classes like those in Qt, LibreOffice should be able to dynamically allocate all of the system memory it needs. For whatever reason this “enhancement” hasn’t happened yet.

JRE Not Installed

The next thing you need to know is that Ubuntu 18.04 (and probably some other distros) doesn’t install a JRE by default.

synaptic jre image

You should really install that so LibreOffice has full functionality.

LibreOffice Hidden Memory Settings

Now we get to the slightly tricky part. LibreOffice has hidden the memory settings.

advanced settings

You need to navigate to Tools->Options->Advanced where you find the button “Open Expert Configuration.” There I changed to the following values.

memory values

You will have to experiment with values which are correct for yourself. I doubled quite a few of the values and LibreOffice seems much snappier.

Hope this helps. If it does, please feel free to purchase one of my books as a thank you. It’s not a horrible burden. Lesedi is only $1 in ebook form.

Edit: 2019-01-26

If you happen to be running on an ordinary machine with an ordinary built in video card running a wide screen monitor, or two monitors, do not edit a document with many images and pages in full screen mode. You will wait whole seconds after right clicking on something for a menu to pop up. Let it be a smaller window, some size it appears to like, and it will be snappy, even with pictures.

I wasted half a day cussing the product before I figured that out. Either they expect waaaaaay too much from the video driver or they have some of the worst scaling code I’ve ever seen.

The Minimum You Need to Know About the Phallus of AGILE is getting close to being sent out for second round editing. First round edits have been applied and back matter added. Y0u should be seeing it before end of year, assuming I can get cover art I like.

Despite these issues, LibreOffice is was still the best Linux word processor in 2019.

Related posts:

Some LibreOffice and OpenOffice Differences

Linux Mint 13 KDE and LibreOffice 4.0

Secret to G fonts in LibreOffice on KDE Neon

The Best Part of Low End

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.