I've been using LibreOffice for years at my job to make slides and handouts. A few months back I upgraded from Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 16.04 and suddenly started encountering a number of issues that have made LibreOffice very frustrating to work with:
- After the upgrade, many of my larger slide decks (200+ slides) were essentially impossible to work with - loading them took minutes and the UI hung incessantly. Copying and pasting slides would often cause the program to grind to a halt for minutes. I resolved this by removing the
libreoffice-gnome
andlibreoffice-gtk
packages, which has made the UI a lot harder to work with. The fallback UI then had numerous graphical glitches with the Gnome3 fallback that I was using, so I had to switch to Unity. (Nothing against Unity - I just didn't like having to switch in order to have functional document editing.) - Many of my handouts contain embedded LibreOffice Draw images. Sporadically, exporting these documents as PDFs will cause the images to simply not show up at all. This has caused some issues in the past when, for example, I sent a TA a set of problem sets to print and none of them had any of the figures present.
- Embedded Draw images used to display with a transparent background. However, these images now all have a solid white background, which is problematic because in some cases I'm using paragraphs with a different background color.
I'm curious what's going on here and how to address it. Specifically:
- Is there a way to retain
libreoffice-gnome
andlibreoffice-gtk
without taking a massive performance hit? - Is there a way to get the embedded images to consistently render as PDFs? Was that a consequence of removing
libreoffice-gnome
? - Is there a way to get the embedded images to have a transparent background? Was that a consequence of removing
libreoffice-gnome
?