Easy citation in LibreOffice / OpenOffice with Mendeley

Creating reference list is always a nightmare. Mendeley and its handy LibreOffice / OpenOffice plugin may be of great help to many. It was for me. Below, I’ll describe how to make it working.

# get & install mendeley from https://www.mendeley.com/download-mendeley-desktop/

# check version of your mendeley
#  Help > About Mendeley Desktop

# clone repo and build plugin
git clone git@github.com:Mendeley/openoffice-plugin.git
cd openoffice-plugin/
python build.py 1.15.2 false

# add to LibreOffice
#  Tools > Extension Manager > Add...
#   and look for `Mendeley-1.15.2.oxt`

After OpenOffice / LibreOffice restart, you should see new bar. Note, in order for the plugin to work, Mendeley has to be running.

What’s great about this plugin, you can adjust citation style by just a few clicks by clicking on `Choose Citation Style`. There is quite extensive database of predefined citation styles, so adjusting the reference style to your favourite journal will take just a few seconds 🙂
More info about the plugin on github.

Reading documents on Kindle

Recently, I wanted to read some documents (i.e. from Google Docs) on my Kindle. I was interested in exporting .mobi, as reading PDFs on Kindle is really annoying.
I found converting .doc into .mobi not a trivial task. Luckily, nearly everything is possible in Ubuntu with a few steps:

  1. Download your document as .doc / .docx
  2. Open .doc / docx in LibreOffice / OpenOffice and export to ePub (you’ll need to install Writer2ePub before)
  3. Import ePub into Calibre and export it to your favourite eBook reader.

Inspired by Quora.