When I open LibreOffice, it doesn't show any words (names of programs, fonts...)

The problem is that when I open the program and/or a file —the manuscript of a book that I am currently writing—, the program doesn’t show me any word; it’s completely blank. Instead of showing me the names of the programs in the main menu (example: Writer, Presentation), it only shows me the image of the program and a short line (-). When I open the file I was working on, it only shows me a blank page with the red lines underneath. I’m frightened that something very bad happened to the program and to my manuscript, which I have been writing for almost a year, and it’s been hard work for me —it will be Hell for me to lose everything. Has this happened to anyone? Does anyone know how to solve the problem or know what to do in case something like that happens?

It sounds like your LibreOffice installation might have gotten corrupted.

Before dealing with that, though, I would make backup copies of the file with your manuscript. (It sounds like you haven’t been in the habit of doing that, and now you understand why you need to.) If you don’t know the filename or where it is stored, you can search in various ways: look for all files with an .odt extension, browse in places like My Documents folder (Windows) where applications often save files by default, or as a last resort search your entire hard drive for a phrase that you know occurs in your MS and probably not elsewhere. BTW, it’s helpful when posting a request like this to indicate what operating system and what version of LO you are using.

Once you’ve found the file, put a copy on a flash drive and take it to another computer with LO or with a program like recent versions of Word that can import odt files. See if the file will open – hopefully that will put your mind at rest about not losing all your work.

Assuming the file is OK, then uninstall your current LO and download a fresh installer. That should fix things.

By default, LO saves auto-recovery information every ten minutes. Assuming you didn’t turn that off, there might be a backup version available that could be used if your file itself got corrupted. I don’t know whether a new installation of LO would find recovery data from an old one, though – maybe someone else can explain that.