One LibreOffice document for multiple uses
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© Lead Image © Oksana Kuzmina, 123RF.com
With a little planning and a few LibreOffice tricks, you can create one document that contains text customized for various end users.
Writer provides several means to hide text. You can hide text with fields or a section or by selecting the Hidden box from the Font Effects for a character or paragraph style. But why, you might wonder, would anyone want to hide text? Perhaps as an Easter egg or as proof of authorship in work done for a client you don't trust? The most obvious reason is for single sourcing: the maintenance of several versions of a document within a single file.
Multiple versions of documents that differ only in some details are common in business or academia. For instance, you might have one version each of a software manual for users, system administrators, and programmers, or separate versions of a curriculum for more than one level of user. Similarly, you might have one version of an exam to be given to students and another version that shows the answers for instructors.
The only trouble is that maintaining multiple versions of a document is difficult. Placing each version in its own file complicates keeping all the versions in sync. Forget just once to update both, and information may be presented to the wrong reader or without important details.
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