Not sure if this is a bug or not and the bug entering page says to use Ask A Question if not sure so… When you are in Center Align mode, there is no visible indication that you have successfully entered a space or how many. The text does not move to the left. There is no space between the cursor and the last non-space character typed. It’s not until after you type something other than a space that you can see where the cursor actually is in relation to the previous text.
… and you are using LO version…? (Please always mention that info.)
To monitor what’s going on, it is wise to enable View>Formatting marks. Writer makesvisible all usually invisible “characters” such as spaces, tab, paragraph marks, newlines and many others. You can keep this flag always enabled because these visual clues do not print.
The question isn’t precise enough, and the questioner seems to work with Formatting Aids off or mostly off - as many beginners do to their detriment. He (f/m) also tries to influence the view or alignment by inserting spaces, what also is a beginner’s mistake.
Thus I have to guess: The Questioner is talking about a line from which the text already flew over to the next line automatically. In this case the described behaviour is intentional on behalf of the software, not only for centered text, but also for “justified” and right aligned text. To change this a hard linebreak needs to be inserted behind the spaces.
Urgent advice: Switch on all the visual aid by ‘Display formatting’ you can get. Go >Tools>Options>LibreOffice Writer>Formatting Aids>Display formatting for the purpose. Do not enable Direct Cursor. It’s not an aid but a disease.
Thank you for your reply. My apologies for the incorrect formatting and missing information… I’m using version 6.3.2.2. Per the bug reporting page I was trying to follow that advice rather than asking for advice how to do something. In question form I guess it would be, how do I make spaces visually ‘appear’ relative to the cursor when in center or right justify modes.
All the formatting aids were checked except Hidden Characters. Checking this made no difference though. Also, I am not trying to pad the location of text with spaces. When you hit the spacebar and a space does not appear it is disorienting at the least. To further illustrate what I am trying to describe, watch your cursor as you are typing your reply (assuming you do so of course 
and notice how the cursor moves away from the text when hitting space giving you the visual cue that yes there is a space and this is where the next character will appear when you hit a key. continued…
Putting in multiple spaces also gives you the indicator you have entered multiple spaces and where the next character you type will appear relative to the preceding characters.
Now watch the cursor when you type a space when center justify (also right justify) is on and you will see the difference. The cursor does not move away from the text (or in the case of center and right justify the text should move left away from the cursor) Without this indicator you are left to wonder how many spaces, if any, you have typed. Granted you will see once you continue typing if you did not actually enter a space or you entered more than you wanted (because of a typo or finicky keyboard). I don’t know if this is by design or not. If it is by design, then the only change to my post would be to make this a feature request instead of a bug report or a how to question.
tdf#117170
To further confuse things, I was experimenting with this issue of the text not moving one character space to the left when a space is typed and found that it seemed to be connected to the Bold key. In Center Justify with Bold turned off I was getting spaces to show up as they should (the distance between text and cursor was changing by 1 character width when adding or deleting spaces.) Turning Bold on made the cursor snap back up against the last non space character typed and turning Bold off again made it jump back to where it was supposed to be… at the end of the accumulated spaces. Then I tried checking if other text modifiers like underline and italic had the same effect. And I couldn’t get the spaces to ‘appear’ again no matter what. Going back to turning Bold on and off now no longer ‘fixed’ the issue showing spaces like it was earlier. So, I ended up stopping testing with the conclusion that it’s definitely a bug and I could not definitively find the steps to toggle the issue.
If you (@rburn999) actually opened a .doc or a .docx file (as @mikekaganski supposed) before experiencing the issue you needed to mention the fact. Always save your documents to the native file formats. If using alien formats, don’t expect perfect results. If you open a file of an alien format, and get strange issues of any kind, fisrt save to the respective native format, reload this fil, and see if the issue is still showing.
(Lots of words, wasted time otherwise.)
For the record, I am having exactly the same problem as rburn999. I am using LibreOffice Version: 6.1.6.3 (x64) on Windows 10. Here is all I need to do to reproduce the problem:
- Open a fresh writer document (File–>New–>Text Document)
- Click Align Center from the formatting bar, or enter ctrl+E.
- Start typing a series of words. As you enter each word and follow it with spaces, the cursor remains at the end of the word until you enter the next non=space character. When you do begin the next word, the cursor will suddenly advance to it.
This can be achieved with a completely new document, so I’m confused by the remark about having opened a .doc or .docx file.
I am indebted to rburn999 for describing the problem. I often begin a document with a centered title but had never noticed that the problem had to do with centering.
Now I know that the workaround for this problem is to enter my title left-justified and center it after I’ve finished typing it in. Thanks!
This can be achieved with a completely new document, so I’m confused by the remark about having opened a .doc or .docx file
… which is strange, unless you are using a custom default template created from a Word file; or had played with Options|Writer|Compatibility and checked [x] Word-compatible trailing blanks to be used by default.
>Tools>Options>LibreOffice Writer>Compatibility>Word-compatible trailing blanks.
You obviously expect the behaviour you would get if this option was disabled.
BTW: The option also works with right aligned paragraphs (left-to right writing)…
(Imo one of the few cases where MS Word behaviour is better. It should, however, also apply to left aligned paragraphs with leading spaces respectively.)
Thanks to Mike Kruglanski for solving this (whether he realized it or not). The solution (or workaround) is to turn off
Options|Writer|Compatibility|Word-compatible trailing blanks
Lupp is correct in saying that both I and rburn999 expect the behavior we get only when this option is off.For the record, I just installed version Version: 6.4.5.2 (x64) and this option is on. So apparently it’s on by default.
Before reading this forum, I was not aware of the existence of this option. I’m guessing its purpose is to avoid making trailing blanks participate in justification. For example, if a line is right justified it would make the right edge be the last non-blank character, rather than the trailing spaces. It looks as if a side effect of this is not to advance the cursor over blanks until the application sees that they are not trailing.
I currently don’t have access to MS Word, so I don’t know if the Microsoft product behaves like this, but I don’t remember ever seeing it. In my own opinion, this is a bug. I don’t think it’s OK to just not echo the characters that the user is typing. But I’m willing to concede that others may view this differently.
I can’t tell if this cursor behavior is intentional, because this option does not appear to be documented. The compatibility page in the documentation (Compatibility) omits this option and one other, compared to what I see in the application.
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If you install a new version to standard paths as the same user, it will NOT set everyting to defauilt, but use the old user profile. If and option was enabled there it will be enabled again.
Thank you, Lupp. I also see that there’s a Reset button, which presumably does set everything to default. Moreover, when I click it, the option we’re talking about goes off, so apparently that’s the default. I still have no idea how it first came to be set in my own profile.
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