FWIW I'm not trying to interrogate you, I'm just trying to understand your perspective. From mine I just checked their checklist [1] and it's unclear to me what on that list you're suggesting required advanced features in Libre Office to achieve.
[1] - https://www.shunn.net/format/2024/01/a_brief_manuscript_form...
Libreoffice only allows either headers on all pages of a specific style, or no headers. So, how to apply a different style to just the first page? It supports that with the title page concept. But that menu only allows you to select either the Default and First Page styles, not custom styles you've added, so you have to modify the global defaults.
Then there's the numbering. LO requires headers to be the same across all pages, up to left/right distinction. That means you can't manually number. If you want to use the shunn "name/title/number" format you have to write "name/title/" and then enable the checkbox, accepting the slightly uneven spacing.
This is probably half a dozen menus altogether, which I consider advanced. It also confused the page numbering and tried to label the title page as the last page.
Another issue is that shunn's requires multiple alignments within a single line. This isn't directly supported in a reasonable way, but the same workarounds are required in MS word and gdocs so it's not like LO is especially deficient.
Smart quotes also don't work on copy-pasted text, only by a primitive typo correction system when typing. That's more of a personal process issue, since I was copying out of the markdown I do my actual editing in.
Exactly.
Just work in the finance or insurance industry for a year, and you will see how it is part of the daily workflow to use very obscure, advanced Excel feature combined with VBA. If a proposed Microsoft Office alternative cannot handle this, it's not suitable.
I personally observe that a lot of nerds who barely use Excel in their daily workflow patronising that ... (in particular LibreOffice) is an alternative to Microsoft Office. Better first learn how the actual powerusers' workflows (in particular for Excel in the finance and insurance industry) actually look like.
1. Got barcode reader and scanned some barcodes from books
2. Looked up these from online API
3. Wrote result in ISBN;Name;Year to output
4. Tried to copy result to Google Sheets
5. No import from custom CSV? (Excel has very good tooling)
6. Actually to split I had to use =SPLIT() and then copy paste results in weird way to actually be able to use first column...
Is this really better? Or good enough...
Most people using Excel/Sheets/Word/Docs are not power users. Pretty much all home use is covered by OpenOffice and that is the majority by user count.
I have Libre Calc installed because I am on mint at home and even if it could do everything excel could do, I don't know how to do things the same way. Neither do most people. The personal experience and network effect is insurmountable for other software.
As an example, I recently submitted a manuscript following standard format [0] with libreoffice. Nothing difficult, just basic professional functionality.
The only way to do it involved editing global default page styles (because custom page styles can't be used for title pages?) and other advanced features. Fair enough, at least it was possible. It's a shame the export process didn't preserve the formatting and screwed up page numbering.
I had to fix the manuscript in gdocs instead, where it was easy.
[0] https://www.shunn.net/format/story/1/