Office tools

The Xfce desktop does not provide any applications for office work. If you need to create office documents containing images and graphs, do spreadsheet¹ and conduct presentations, there are a lot of packages providing either individual applications or software suites². I’ll cover the most basic needs as follows and refer each application to their proprietary counterpart:

1. An #Office suite for:
   1. Word processing
   2. Spreadsheet
   3. Presentation
2. Viewing and manipulating #PDF files
3. Scientific and technical writing with LaTeX

Office suite

LibreOffice is a very powerful office suite and alternative to Microsoft Office. It has improved compatibility to proprietary document formats using file type endings such as .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx, and is regarded as the more actively developed successor to OpenOffice. (See a comparison.) If you need to work with “office files”, this is the best option.

To use the release variant containing the newest features I install the package libreoffice-fresh. Additionally, I install a language, spell checking and hyphenation package:

sudo pacman -S libreoffice-fresh
sudo pacman -S libreoffice-fresh-de hunspell-de hyphen-de

There are many extensions available. I try to find packages in the official repositories or in the AUR to circumvent manual upgrading.

Java environment

Some functions of LibreOffice depend on the Java³ programming language. The OpenJDK version is sufficient and provided by jre-openjdk:

sudo pacman -S jre-openjdk

Additional fonts

Though the Liberation fonts installed in the #fonts section of the Xfce desktop guide are metric-compatible you might need other font families to avoid font replacement and metric problems while collaborating. I install the packages ttf-ms-fonts and ttf-vista-fonts from the AUR as follows:

yay ttf-ms-fonts ttf-vista-fonts

Other recommended font packages are gnu-free-fonts. I install these using the following command:

sudo pacman -S gnu-free-fonts

If you need fonts optimized for emojis and symbols, math or other operating system fonts search the ArchWiki.

PDF files

A comparison of PDF applications reveals that Xreader seems to be a lightweight but also full-featured PDF viewer powered by the Poppler rendering library. It is capable of annotation, forms, and non-rectangle selection of text, and can be installed using the following command:

sudo pacman -S xreader

Signatures and handwriting

If you need to add a signature or image to pages in a PDF or want to use handwritten notes also install the Xournal++ application:

sudo pacman -S xournalpp

Encrypt PDF files

In order to encrypt PDF files I use qpdf and visual extraction, split, merge and reorganization of pages can be done in the PDF Mix Tool. I Install these apps using the following command:

sudo pacman -S qpdf pdfmixtool

To actually encrypt a PDF file the syntax is:

qpdf --encrypt $USERPASSWORD $OWNERPASSWORD $KEYLENGTH -- file.pdf encrypted.pdf

I set an $USERPASSWORD, $OWNERPASSWORD, and $KEYLENGTH variable in advance and set the key length to the maximum of 256 bits (KEYLENGTH=256).

LaTeX

In academic environments there’s a need for high-quality typesetting that separates document design (e.g., font sizes, placement of text, tables, and images) and content. LaTeX⁴ provides a pragmatic approach to write scientific documnets, such as research papers, journal articles and technical reports, without being distracted by design choices.

There are a few TeX editors in the list of applications for Arch Linux. Though .tex documents are just plain text files containing LaTeX markup language, it’s advisable to use an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), as it also takes care of managing BibTeX⁵ (for references), intermediary outputs, and compiling the final PDF file. I use TeXstudio and install the package via:

sudo pacman -S texstudio

The TeX Live distribution is provided in the official repositories of Arch Linux. I use a minimal set of packages:

sudo pacman -S texlive-basic texlive-latex texlive-fontsrecommended

If TeXstudio complains about missing .sty, .fmt, etc. files, I use the following Pacman command to identify the required package:

sudo pacman -F foo.sty bar.fmt

I like to avoid using tlmgr in order to leave package management to Pacman.