Open LibreOffice apps Individually on MacOS

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04/04/2022 under construction

Synopsis

LibreOffice on MacOs is a monolithic application, it is just one executable. There are no individual applications like on Linux or Windows, i.e. writer or scalc. It is however possible to start LibreOffice with blank writer or calc document. The way to do that is with the use of the terminal application and the open command.

Implementation

This implementation is based on LibreOffice 7.3 and using the zsh in terminal.

Bare Bones

Locate the LibreOffice application in finder.

• Right Click and select |Show Package Content|
• Then open |Content| and |MacOs|
• Locate the soffice executable.

Now open an terminal and type at the prompt |open -a | , observe the space after the a. Now drag the soffice icon from the finder window to the terminal window. You should get the path to the soffice executable.
After that type | --new --args --writer | You should have something like this

open -a /Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --new --args --writer

Now press enter and LibreOffice should open with a blank writer document.

The same can be done for: calc, draw, impress, math, global and web.
Just replace: -- writer with: --calc , --draw , --impress , --math , --global or --web .

Automate

The process can be automated using a shell script. Open TextEditor and create a file swriter.
In the document type or copy past:

#!/bin/zsh
open -a /Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --new --args --writer

Open terminal and locate the swriter document. Make the document executable.

chmod +x swriter

You can now double click the swriter script in finder and Libreoffice will open with a blank writer document.
You might need to change | #!/bin/zsh | with | #!/bin/bash |, if you use bash instead of zsh.

Making it nice

The scripts icons can be replaced by the appropriate document icons.
Again locate the LibreOffice application in finder.

• Right Click and select | Show Package Content |
• Then open | Content | and | Resources |
• Locate the icons at the bottom of the window.

Now open for instance the | text.icns | file with preview.

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