From odt to tex

To export from odt to latex, using Libreoffice (5.0., etc) I tried the various options available in the Libreoffice extension writer2latex:

• ultraclean
• clean
• default
• custom

 Custom was crashing, though it seems the best in view of larger projects. It allows customization of preamble, including the possibility of using weird packages and user-defined commands.

Default was working out of the box, with some ballast useless for my purpose (textrm).

Ultraclean was working, but did not mark key formatting such as italics.

Clean was the best option.

In all cases, there is a window control with some settings related to language, bibtex, etc., that need to be fine tuned. There also xe(la)tex is available. Altogether, awesome extension!

Libreoffice crashes in Ubuntu

LibreOffice (Writer) was crashing on Ubuntu 16.04. At first I thought it was the writer2latex extension I recently enabled. Then I thought I had a buggy outdated version.

I removed the extension, and I updated to 6, following this lead.

Still it was crashing. It's a bug. This workaround seems the only way to fix it. In Libreoffice > Tools > Options > Libreoffice > Advanced, disable "Use a Java runtime environment".

However, the problem is that one cannot enable the extension writer2latex, and I suppose other extensions too, without a java runtime environment. For now, the only solution to get both Libreoffice and the extension working might be to downgrade to a previous version of Ubuntu.

Upgrading to 18.04 did not help, same problem on the Lenovo laptop. But it somehow works on the Dell XPS. SO THERE IS SOME HOPE!