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I'm writing a report on statistics and therefore I need to type a lot of special characters in Libre Office. But there's a couple of characters that isn't on the list. Characters like an X with a line on top of it. Kind of an x with underscore but opposite.

Is there something that I can do to add new special characters in libre office?

any thoughts?

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5 Answers 5

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A symbol such as an x (lowercase or uppercase) with a line on top of it does not exist as a coded character in Unicode (or any other character code standard). This is why you cannot find it in character pallettes.

However, you can enter such a symbol using a normal letter followed by a combining diacritic mark, which could be U+0304 COMBINING MACRON or U+0305 COMBINING OVERLINE. I have to check my own e-book to see which one is better... yep, overline is generally preferable here, since it is more noticeable (longer). Besides, macron is originally intended for use in linguistics (to indicate long vowel, typically), rather than part of a mathematical notation. But this may also depend on the font used, in practice.

The following image shows the letter x, in italic, with macron, then with overline, and then, for comparison, a formula constructed as suggested in @Rishabh’s answer.

enter image description here

You can enter a combining diacritic mark (which is always entered after the base character it should apply to) in LibreOffice using Insert → Special character, check selecting “Combining Diacritical Marks” in the “Subset” menu and proceeding as usual. When you click on a character in the pallette, you will see the Unicode number (like U+0305) on the right. This is important because the characters are often difficult to distinguish.

enter image description here

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    Hmm.. sound good but when I do it I can't find the U+0305. If the Font is times, then I have U+0303 and then it jumps to U+0309? But it works perfectly with U+0303;)
    – Top Rookie
    Dec 16, 2014 at 13:29
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    @TopRookie, then presumably Times in your system does not contain U+0305. Try another font, like DejaVu Serif. (I need to confess that I’m using Win7, and in it Times New Roman has a good repertoire of combining diacritics.) Dec 16, 2014 at 13:32
  • Bingo DejaVu Sans did the job. Thanks a lot for your time and help
    – Top Rookie
    Dec 16, 2014 at 14:22
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In LibreOffice Writer:

  1. Go to InsertObjectOle Object
  2. Select Create New LibreOffice Formula
  3. Write bar{x}.

This will insert x bar into it; you can add other symbols (closely related to how LaTeX does it).

LibreOffice Calc and Impress also provide similar options.

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  • Close, but not all the way... Got a lot closer though :)
    – Top Rookie
    Dec 16, 2014 at 12:08
  • This creates a formula, containing x, not a special character. This may or may not be better than using a special character, but in any case it is not an answer to the question. Dec 16, 2014 at 12:11
  • maybe not. But its close enough for my personal use. Might create problems with other characters
    – Top Rookie
    Dec 16, 2014 at 12:12
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Old but relevant. I would suggest the use of autocorrect option. Here's how:

use autocorrect to type symbols in libreoffice

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I think the special characters available depends on the font being used - e.g:

enter image description here enter image description here

So you could look for a font that has this character available

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  • Tried a lot of different combinations.. Didn't seem to be what I wanted.. good guess though
    – Top Rookie
    Dec 16, 2014 at 12:09
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I find a way to get x-bar in LibreOfiice Calc without creating a formula but using symbol.

For lowercase x-bar: Type x in a cell, then Insert/Special Character/ U+305

For uppercase X-bar: The bar will overlap letter X if we use the same step above. So this is my workaround: type lowercase x-bar then formatting it to uppercase. Using Format/Text/Uppercase.

I hope this will help.

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