Libreoffice and MS Word together?

danb

Is it realistic to use Libreoffice and Word together on the same document?

The documents are pretty simple (typical paper: text, pictures, formulas), but Zotero gives us constraints on the file type (docx vs odt) and the way the references are stored in the file:

LibreOffice:
ReferenceMarks (recommended)
- cannot be shared with word
- the document must be saved as .odt

Bookmarks
- the document must be saved as .doc or .docx

Word:
Fields (recommended)
- cannot be sharet with LibreOffice
- the document must be saved as .doc or .docx

Bookmarks
- the document must be saved as .doc or .docx

If these warnings are correct, it is unfortunately not possible to use .odt with both LibreOffice and Word, but it would work for .docx.

In addition, I can't use the recommended formats ReferenceMarks/Fields, but have to rely on Bookmarks.

Bookmarks seem to be more fragile than the recommended formats. I have played a bit with them and got a couple of error messages about inadvertently modifying the content.

Has anyone experience with this setup?

Are there any other potential issues I need to look into?

bwiernik

It might be possible to work in ODT with Bookmarks. I don’t know that anyone had tested that extensively. It might be worth a test.

The major limitations of bookmarks is that they can’t be inserted into tables or footnotes, and they are easier to corrupt than Fields or ReferenceMarks. But if you want to move between Word and LibreOffice, they work fine. Just be sure to always grab a space before and after the citation when deleting/cutting/copying to avoid corruption issues.

danb

I just did an experiment with odt and it seems to work. Thanks for the suggestion. On saving with word, I get an error message "may contain features that are not compatible with this format", but adding and editing citations in the other program seems to work.

Unfortunately I ran into another serious problem that is unrelated to Zotero.
In case anyone considers doing the same:
MS Word 2013 and Libreoffice 6.1.2.1 have a different interpretation of image luminance in the odf file.
The end result is that images in Word are displayed far too darkly.

https://issues.oasis-open.org/browse/OFFICE-3821
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67312

For me this is a dealbreaker. I would have preferred to work with odt, but my collaborators insist on Word.