LibreOffice Writer

Writer is the word processor included in LibreOffice, comparable to Microsoft Word. I’ve found that most Microsoft Word documents that don’t rely on VBA or macro scripting will load and work just fine in Writer. The files are almost 100% compatible, and only very complex documents will ever have any issues.

Figure 4-1 is an image of this book being worked on in LibreOffice Writer.

Notice that all the styles are right there in an easy-to-use side pane, just as they would be in Word. Writer also offers features like tracking changes, printing to either a printer or PDF file (among other options), tables, formulas, bibliographies, mail merge, and lots of other advanced features beyond just typing in documents.

LibreOffice Calc

Calc is the spreadsheet portion of LibreOffice, similar in functions to Microsoft Excel. As with Writer, it can save and load Excel files, and with the exception of Excel’s macros and VBA script, it can run most spreadsheets without difficulty. It offers relative and absolute referencing, tracking changes, error tracing, pivot tables, and many surprisingly complex calculations. Figure 4-2 is a look at Calc doing some very basic calculations.

LibreOffice Impress

Like the previous two entries, Impress is essentially LibreOffice’s feature clone of PowerPoint. Although it doesn’t have PowerPoint’s impressive collection of themes, it does have nearly all the same features. Figure 4-3 gives us a look at Impress in action.

Other LibreOffice Tools

The big three apps in LibreOffice are Writer, Calc, and Impress; but there are other apps within the office suite. LibreOffice Draw is a tool for creating flowcharts, diagrams, and any vector-type images. There’s also Math, an equation editor for easily creating and formatting mathematical formulas for use in any of the other LibreOffice products. Lastly is Base, a database creation and management app, along the same lines as, but not compatible with, Microsoft Access. Most of the databases available for Linux are of the SQL variety and are designed more for server-side use, so Access doesn’t really have any direct clone for us. If this is a major problem, look into Base and then see if there are any other apps that can replicate the specific functionality that you need.

LibreOffice is easily the most powerful choice for an office suite that you can install on the Raspberry Pi, but there are other options available if you can work in the cloud rather than an installed suite.

Microsoft Office

No, Microsoft doesn’t make a version of Office, or any other products, for the Raspberry Pi. That said, you can use Microsoft Office Online in your preferred web browser. There are browser-based versions of Word (in Figure 4-4), Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as Outlook and OneNote; and all of them can save and load regular desktop versions of those files. You can find all this at www.office.com .

Keep in mind, however, that even though this is a real, official Office product made by Microsoft itself, this cloud version of Office is not even close to feature parity with the desktop version of Microsoft Office. In fact, if you need advanced tools or close compatibility, you are probably better off going with LibreOffice instead of Office Online. On the plus side, the web version is offered by Microsoft for free, and if you only need to do fairly simple work, it is a stable and reliable system that works well. Also, being on the cloud means it can be used anywhere with no need to carry your files around with you.

Google Docs

Another well-known cloud service is Google Drive or Google Docs (shown in Figure 4-5), and like Microsoft Office, it is a cloud-based service that works well on the Pi. It can be found at https://drive.google.com .

All the various parts of Google’s office suite (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, etc.) were designed from the ground up to be a lightweight but powerful “office suite in the cloud,” and it’s awesome on a regular desktop computer; these are the primary tools for the entire line of Chromebook computers. Google Docs does work reliably on the Pi, but often involves some frustratingly slow page load times. I have found that while it is sometimes uncomfortably laggy in the Chromium browser, it seems to work nicely with the Vivaldi browser. Experiment for yourself and see what works best for you.

Scribus

Scribus Details:

Installation: sudo apt install scribus

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Graphics

Help: man scribus

Web site: www.scribus.net/

LibreOffice Writer is the best choice for general word processing, and it can do some page layout functions as well, but for complex page layouts and desktop publishing, there’s a better choice: Scribus. Scribus is an open source desktop publisher, similar in function to, but very different from, Microsoft Publisher.

There are numerous monthly magazines produced using Scribus, including the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s own The MagPi Magazine.

Leafpad (aka Text Editor)

Leafpad Details:

Installation: sudo apt install leafpad

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Accessories

Help: man leafpad

Web site: http://tarot.freeshell.org/leafpad/

Under Raspberry ➤ Accessories is an option simply called “Text Editor.” This brings up a bare-bones text editing app known as Leafpad. If you need to edit system files, want to read a file, or simply want to write in plain, mostly unformatted text, this app has you covered. It’s really super easy to use, and it compares to WordPad on Windows and TextEdit on Mac.

Note that when you’re installing “writing apps,” there is a big difference between a word processor and a text editor. A text editor loads and saves pure text, with no special formatting, fonts, or layout options, while a word processor includes formatting such as bold, italic, margins, fonts, colors, and the like. Word processor formats, such as .docx, .odt, and the like, tie your documents to the specific word processor that created them, while pure text documents, .txt, .md, or .tex, can be read by any text editor.

AbiWord

AbiWord Details:

Installation: sudo apt install abiword

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Office

Help: man abiword

Web site: www.abisource.com/

This word processor doesn’t install in Raspbian by default; you’ll need to add it. If you don’t need all the other apps in the LibreOffice suite and simply want a stand-alone word processor, this is the one to try. It’s small and fast, and it’s cross-platform, so you can also install it on other computers.

Texmaker

Texmaker Details:

Installation: sudo apt install texmaker

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Office

Help: man texmaker

Web site: www.xm1math.net/texmaker/

This isn’t a standard word processor. It’s a tool for writing in LaTeX, a text-formatting system we’ll discuss more in Chapter 7. To quickly summarize, LaTeX is a text-formatting language that allows you to describe extremely complex and detailed text layouts, equations, math, images, and even things like margins and fonts, all using simple text commands. If this sounds complex, that’s because it is complex, but tools like Texmaker help ease that complexity significantly. Figure 4-6 shows us an example LaTeX document in the left-hand pane and a compiled, finished document in the right-hand pane.

Qpdfview

Qpdfview Details:

Installation: sudo apt install qpdfview (preinstalled in Raspbian)

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Accessories

Help: man qpdfview

Web site: https://github.com/bendikro/qpdfview

If you simply double-click a pdf file in the File Manager, the system will open the file and allow you to view it using an app called Qpdfview . It’s a simple little app that will let you quickly and easily view pdfs. It doesn’t do very much, but it loads quick and is compatible with complex pdf files, so try it out; and if that’s all you need, then just stick with that. Why use a complex tool if a simple one will do the job?

Evince

Evince Details:

Installation: sudo apt install evince

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Office

Help: man evince

Web site: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince

Evince is the next step-up in PDF readers. You can view two pages side by side, create bookmarks, annotate the text, print, see thumbnails (as in the screenshot in Figure 4-7), and much more. In Figure 4-7, you can see an index of thumbnails on the left and a large, readable page on the right. The views can be configured several different ways, so this is one of the most flexible pdf readers.

Okular

Okular Details:

Installation: sudo apt install okular

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Office

Help: man okular

Web site: https://okular.kde.org/

If you need more advanced tools to work with and edit pdfs, then this is the tool you’ll want to look at. You can select and edit areas of a document, print, bookmark, reorder pages, and much more. It also does other formats beyond just PDF: Postscript, DjVu, CHM, XPS, EPUB, and others are supported. As you can see in Figure 4-8, Okular has a few more options, but also gives us a more convoluted interface.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird Details:

Installation: sudo apt install thunderbird

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Internet

Help: man thunderbird

Web site: www.thunderbird.net/

Thunderbird has been around since 2004, and you can get versions for all the major operating systems. It’s comparable in features to Microsoft Outlook, and it’s released by Mozilla, the same people who make the Firefox web browser; so they’re reliable, established, and not going away anytime soon. If you use a web browser to check your email, that’s fine, but if you want an offline mail app, this is the one to try. It includes a contact list, a calendaring app, and lots of other powerful tools.

Configuring your email accounts is usually pretty easy; I put in my Gmail account and password, and it set up everything else for me automatically. The results are shown in Figure 4-9.

Claws Mail

Claws Details:

Installation: sudo apt install claws-mail

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Internet

Help: man claws-mail

Web site: www.claws-mail.org/

Claws Mail, shown in Figure 4-10, comes preinstalled in Raspbian, so you already have this available to you. It has several dialogs to help you get your account set up, but it’s not as intuitive as Thunderbird; you may need to check out the instructions your web provider offers in order to configure POP3, SMTP, and IMAP settings manually. It’s also nowhere near as full featured as Thunderbird, but, once it’s configured, it’s simple and really fast to use on the Pi, so this may be all you need.

Chromium

Chromium Details:

Installation: sudo apt install chromium (preinstalled in Raspbian)

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Internet

Help: man chromium

Web site: www.chromium.org/

Chromium is the browser that’s included in Raspbian, and it’s the open source version of Google’s Chrome browser. A lot of the code that is embedded in Chromium eventually makes it into regular Chrome.

You can log in to Google using your Google account (this is the same as your Gmail account if you have one), and all your bookmarks, menu settings, themes, extensions, and everything else will sync over quickly, giving you an experience just like any other version of Chrome. For most web sites and situations, this is the fastest browser for use with Raspbian, although some other browsers may have the edge if you are using a different distribution. I’d recommend trying several different browsers and then picking whichever one works the best for your working style.

Firefox

Firefox Details:

Installation: sudo apt install firefox

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Internet

Help: man firefox

Web site: www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

Many businesses and groups have standardized their office on Firefox, since Mozilla places a much higher value on user’s privacy than Google. If you are used to using Firefox elsewhere, then it’s easy to install and use it on your Pi as well—once you log in with your Firefox account and password, all your bookmarks and settings should import from the cloud, so the experience should be just like using Firefox on any other computer.

Then follow the onscreen instructions to log in and sync your bookmarks if you want, or just start browsing. Note that as of the time of this writing, the version of Firefox available for the Pi is version 52.9, which is 2 years old; Mozilla is not currently developing updates for the Raspberry Pi, so as time continues to pass, this will fall further and further out of date, which may cause security issues. That being said, Firefox does currently work, and it works well. There’s no way to be sure if they will update it or continue to release new updates.

Vivaldi

Vivaldi Details:

Installation: (see in the following)

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Internet

Help: (see web site)

Web site: http://vivaldi.com

Vivaldi is a newer browser that has lots of fun new features. It’s extremely customizable, allowing you to put tabs in stacks and groups, split the browser window in various ways, and even put a notes app within the browser itself. I have found that on the Pi, it’s often significantly faster loading pages than Chromium. It’s worth a few minutes of your time to check out the introductory video on their web site, http://vivaldi.com .

This is interesting to note because this is the process you would generally use to install any “Debian package” that is not specifically included in the Raspbian repositories. The first two lines simply update the repository information on your Pi and also update any software that needs updating. The third line (wget) downloads the installation file, and the fourth line installs the app using the familiar “sudo apt install” process. You would need to know the exact URL for the .deb file, so this isn’t something you can just work out for yourself, but you might find an install of this kind as you find apps on the Web that aren’t available in the built-in repositories.

The Tor Browser

Tor Details:

Installation: sudo apt install tor

Run command: tor

Help: man tor

Web site: www.torproject.org/

Tor is a system for combining a VPN (Virtual Private Network) and a web browser. It’s a browser that will disguise your location and any trackable information about you. For truly private browsing, this is a tool to look into.

This will run the Chromium browser that’s already installed and make all output go through Tor’s VPN-like system. When I ran the preceding command, I then went to Google Maps, shown in Figure 4-11, to see where it thought I was located. It showed me a location in Kharkiv, Ukraine!

GNote

GNote Details:

Installation: sudo apt install gnote

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Accessories

Help: man gnote

Web site: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gnote

This is a super-simple notebook app that easily lets you type or cut and paste text into a note and even allows you to link notes together. Although you can do basic formatting like bold, italic, and underlining, there is no way to insert images or other non-text items. The goal with GNote is to be as simple as possible. When you run it, you will see something like Figure 4-12.

OneNote

OneNote is part of the Microsoft Office suite, and like Word and Excel, it also has an online component. It’s one of the most powerful note-taking apps available, whether on the Pi or elsewhere; and everything you enter into it syncs to your iPhone, Android, or other computers seamlessly. You have multiple ways of organizing your data—individual notebooks, or sections within those notebooks, and then on individual pages. There’s a lot of flexibility; and you can include text, images, pdfs, and even sound files. Unlike the other Office apps, OneNote is free to use on all platforms for everyone.

Figure 4-13 shows my color-coded sections on the left, the names of a couple of pages in the middle column, and a clipped article in the main pane.

You can learn more about OneNote at www.onenote.com .

Zim

Zim Details:

Installation: sudo apt install zim

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Accessories

Help: man zim

Web site: https://zim-wiki.org/

Zim (Figure 4-14) is a desktop wiki. A wiki is a method of collecting, linking, and organizing a bunch of pages of data. If you’re familiar with Wikipedia, you have the idea, but this is much simpler and easier to manage. All data is stored in plain text files with wiki formatting. If you usually just enter a bunch of random things in your notebooks, this app may be overkill; but if your notes require any kind of organization, whether simple or complex, this is worth checking out. It also allows storage of text, links, photos, task lists, and equation editor and accepts plug-ins for expansion.

Zim is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and many other platforms; so if syncing your data is important, Zim has you covered. You can learn more about Zim at https://zim-wiki.org .

Cherrytree

Cherrytree Details:

Installation: (see in the following)

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Accessories

Help: man cherrytree

Web site: www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/

Cherrytree is another wiki, similar in many ways to Zim, but it’s far more complex and allows a vast number of customizations and features. It’s got a much more modern interface than Zim. It can store text, images, files, links, tables, and executable snippets of code. It allows you to contain all your data in a single xml file, or if you have a huge number of notes, you can store them in an SQL database. Cherrytree is available for Linux and Windows, but there is no Mac version, so keep that in mind if you are considering syncing your data between machines.

Figure 4-15 shows the Raspberry Pi edition.

Audacity

Audacity Details:

Installation: sudo apt install audacity

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Sound & Video

Help: man audacity

Web site: https://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/

On “regular” computers, Audacity is known far and wide for being the most feature-packed open source sound editing system. It has plug-ins, effects, macros, and a ton of other features. I personally have edited everything from podcasts to audiobooks using Audacity on my Mac.

Audacity for the Raspberry Pi, as shown in Figure 4-16, has most of the same features found on a full-powered computer, which is good, but it’s painfully slow to do very much with it on anything less than the model 4 Pi. The problem is not the app itself, but the size of the sound files, which often get quite large; the Pi model 3B+ and older models just don’t have enough RAM to work with those files efficiently. Still, for things like saving a file in a different format or doing little edits, it works fine on the older Pi!

That said, with the new Raspberry Pi 4, it works without trouble. Really large files may still run into limitations due to RAM, but most short recordings can be loaded and edited just fine.

Kdenlive

Kdenlive Details:

Installation: (see in the following)

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Sound & Video

Help: man kdenlive

Web site: https://kdenlive.org/en/

Whereas Audacity works with sound files, Kdenlive works with video. Where Audacity works quite well on the Pi model 4, Kdenlive still somewhat struggles with video. It runs, it loads files, but in all honesty, video editing is really not something even the newest Pi is going to be good at, simply because video files are huge. Still, it installs and runs, so play around with it if you’re curious.

VLC Player

VLC Player Details:

Installation: sudo apt install vlc

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Sound & Video

Help: man vlc

Web site: www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

Editing video is a little much for the Raspberry Pi, but watching them is a whole lot easier. If you just want to watch videos, you cannot go wrong with VLC Player, shown in Figure 4-17. It includes many of the video codecs you need to play various video and music formats and lets you play either movies or music playlists, use subtitles, and do streaming; and it’s very configurable to boot.

The model 3B+ RPi cannot deal with 4K videos, but for 720p and even most 1080p videos, it works just fine. With the model 4 Pi, video output was one of the primary goals of the upgrade. Not only can it easily handle 4K video but it can do it with two monitors at once. Video performance was one of the main goals for the upgrade, so you can truly say that it’s built for video output with two 4K HDMI outputs.

Music Players

Once in a while, it’s fun to listen to music. VLC, mentioned earlier, will play music and playlists just great, but an app that specializes in music management and library-keeping is going to offer a lot more features. I have known people who have taken a dedicated Raspberry Pi and included them in various types of jukebox and antique radio lookalike projects. We’re not going to go that far here, but here are a trio of great MP3 players that you can try. In addition to regular music files, if you’re into audio podcasts, both Amarok and Clementine both work with them easily.

Amarok Details:

Installation: sudo apt install amarok

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Sound & Video

Help: man amarok

Web site: https://amarok.kde.org/

Amarok is a player that can handle all the audio files stored on your computer and can handle a large number of streaming web services as well. Last.fm, LibriVox, MP3Tunes, podcasts, and many more sites and services are supported.

Qmmp Details:

Installation: sudo apt install qmmp

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Sound & Video

Help: man qmmp

Web site: http://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/

Qmmp for many years, the go-to music player on Windows, was an app called Winamp. The developer gave up on updating and developing Winamp several years ago, but this Winamp-lookalike app is available and works very well. It handles MP3 files and playlists and does it all in style. If you remember Winamp, take a look at Qmmp.

Clementine Details:

Installation: sudo apt install clementine

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Sound & Video

Help: man clementine

Web site: www.clementine-player.org/

Clementine is cross-platform, so if you create bunch of playlists on your Pi, you can move them elsewhere without issues. It’s similar in many ways to iTunes in that it does just about everything. Clementine will manage your library, connect to web services, and a host of other functions. Figure 4-18 shows the RPi version.

GIMP

GIMP Details:

Installation: sudo apt install gimp

Menu Location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Graphics

Help: man gimp

Web site: www.gimp.org/

GIMP, shown in Figure 4-19, is short for the GNU Image Manipulation Program and is a very feature-packed graphic editor, in the same class as Adobe’s Photoshop. Unlike the audio and video editors we discussed a few pages ago, GIMP works just fine on the Pi. Some of the image calculations and complicated renders may be slow at times, but it’s not too bad, and there are no slowdowns in actually working with the app; it’s not at all painful.

There are built-in “scripts” that make logos, buttons, and other net things, there are many filters and editing settings, and they all work on the Pi. It’s an extremely capable and complex app, able to do nearly anything with an image, but all this power comes with a steep learning curve. Fortunately, it’s a popular app, and there are many books and videos available to show you how to get started.

As usual, this can be installed with sudo apt install gimp.

FileZilla

FileZilla Details:

Installation: sudo apt install filezilla

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Internet

Help: man filezilla

Web site: https://filezilla-project.org/

Created by the Mozilla Foundation, the same people who made Firefox and Thunderbird, FileZilla is a safe and powerful FTP manager. You can keep a list of FTP servers, complete with login information on hand, and transfer files between them easily. Need to copy a bunch of music files from your PC? This is one way to do it.

You can browse through all your files on the Pi in the left-hand pane and all the remote files and directories on the remote machine in the right-hand pane and then just copy, move, delete, or whatever you want to do, easily, using the mouse.

FileZilla uses either plain ftp or sftp for added security. If your file transfers get interrupted, they are easily resumed, continuing where the first batch failed. This is my favorite way to get files into and out of my Pi at home from another computer on the same network. You can see me connecting to my Mac in Figure 4-21; the local RPi files are on the left, and the files on the right are in my Mac’s hard drive. Just drag and drop to move files from one to the other, and it’s just as easy to move whole folders.

Deluge

Deluge Details :

Installation: sudo apt install deluge

Menu location: Raspberry Menu ➤ Internet

Help: man deluge

Web site: https://deluge-torrent.org/

Deluge is a cross-platform BitTorrent client, and there’s a screenshot in Figure 4-22. BitTorrent has always been a little controversial, as it’s often used as a way to pirate movies and music, but it has a lot of legitimate uses as well. Most, if not all, distributions of Linux can be downloaded through a BitTorrent system, and the files usually transfer faster than a plain download. Whatever your purpose in running a torrent, Deluge is the solution for doing it on the Pi. Go to a site that offers .torrent files and download it somewhere on your Pi. Load up Deluge and open up the .torrent file with it, and the target file will download.