Can i use libre office to write long form documents ( 300-700 pages) with images in them? I tried MS word but it crashed. I do not want that to happen again.
What do you call a “long form document”? Is this only a matter of size?
In this case, the answer is yes, but there is a caveat.
If you work the M$ Word way, you’ll bump into the same problem (not crashing but degraded performance). With such document sizes, you must avoid direct formatting and exclusively apply styles, including for bold or italics (character style category which does not exist in Word). With a lot of images, frame styles are also mandatory but they are difficult to understand and master (and they are very very sensitive to direct formatting which completely nullify their effect). And last, prepare all your images outside Writer so that they are used “as is” without scaling, cropping or clipping. Writer indeed has functions for that but it is no image manipultaing program; so it is preferable, for performance and file size, to trim down your images beforehand.
An ultimate fundamental remark: save your document in native .odt format, otherwise after two or three editing sessions its structure (encoding) will be so damaged by the conversions that reviewing it will become a nightmare.
UPDATE:
Give more details about your goal so that I can suggest best tracks. Will your document be a photo catalogue (mainly image oriented with captions/descriptions)? Is it an illustrated narrative (fewer images than the first case)? Is it an “academic” paper with moderately numerous drawings?
One of the key factors in design and solution(s) is the ratio of images to text.
Remember also that Writer is flow-oriented, i.e. pages are automatically allocated or removed to “absorb” text development. If you require a specific layout where pages are a basis for your layout with a fixed disposition of elements, consider DTP (desktop publishing) programs like FOSS Scribus: you manually allocate pages and you must manage yourself flow across pages in case text needs to span several pages.
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In addition to @ajlittoz remarks, after going to the trouble of preparing your images to the correct size and format, make sure that you Insert > Image or drag the image file from the file manager. That way it won’t get converted to PNG with potentially a large increase in file size which is what happens if you paste an image from clipboard.
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As usual with a large long running project, save versions of the document as you go and backup somewhere else, more at Preventing data disaster - The Document Foundation Wiki
A long form document would be 300 or more pages long with images
Minal
The “Designing with LibreOffice” book (DWL-SecondEdition.odt) discussed in this topic has 618 pages and 288 (.png) images. There are virtually no lags when opening, saving, or editing.
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Thank you!
MINAL
Hi just so you know. I just tried to open the latest Writer pdf manual in adobe acrobat dc and the app crashed. Tried it several times with this pdf and a variety of other pdf files ( not at the same time), Writer manual was the only pdf file that made the program crash.
Minal
Generally, I find with Acrobat reader that it will crash on long pdfs when you use Search. This is an issue with Acrobat Reader, not the document, other readers do not suffer the same embarrassment.
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As you want to test Writer, download the guide in ODF format (it will download with extension .odt)