Version Control Information

[MenaceG]

Hello all,

first time poster here, apologies if my question is laboring under any incorrect assumptions.
I’d like to use the Version control system built into LibreWriter, as it seems fairly intuitive.
I would like to have some sort of printing indication of the document version populated onto the document itself. I understand that there is the “Revision Number” field that can be inserted, but this appears to tick up with each save. I’d like, if possible to include my comment from the version control dialog as a field on the document.
Is this possible with the base version of LibreOffice Writer? (v. 7.4.5.1 x64)

Regards,
MenaceG

[mikekaganski]

Fields for data from versioning system in LibreOffice would be a reasonable feature request.

[jfn]

Hi MenaceG!
Welcome to this help site.

I can’t answer about the internal versioning system LibreOffice uses – others might have better insight – but you might want to use an extension named VersionMgr, here. This should fulfill your requisites.

HTH,

[ajlittoz]

Writer doesn’t provide a “traditional” version control system. I.e. you can’t check out an arbitrary version and keep the saved tree unchanged. From my experiment, whenever you save over a “checked-out” version, this discards all descendants of this version. In other words, you can’t experiment with contents or formatting and revert to another “parallel” version below the checkout point.

Since this doesn’t fulfil my expectations I don’t use it, preferring manage the versions through a manual naming scheme.

Inserting a revision number is another story. Field Revision number counts the number of saves. This is clearly stated in the built-in help (you read it, didn’t you?).

A meaningful revision number can be defined with a custom property in File>Properties. If you choose string format, your revision number can be any form you like, such as major.minor.fix allowing more sophistication than a simple number.

I didn’t experiment with the version feature (as I don’t use it) to see if the custom property is “local” to the version but this is likely and could be a better alternative to built-in Revision number field. Here is an example of my use of revision numbers in document header: