Can I fix initial spaces to be a certain width

[thesun]

I am trying to typeset a book for publishing and have it justified to the left and right, and LibreOffice is (usually) adding space between words in a way that makes sense.

What’s frustrating me is that it has included the initial 3 spaces that I used to replace the , making some of them wider as well. Thus, my indents vary. Here’s an example:

   "Move to the right!" I said, ducking.
   "Okay!" he shouted back.
     "Now move to the left!"
   "Done."
        Eventually, the platoon made it past the trip wires and came out to a wide field, once a rice paddy.  Davis took out a pack of cigarettes and lit up.
   Suddenly, there was a noise.

So in this example, above, I’m using more spaces to show what’s happening, but in my document, these are all exactly 3 spaces. I want to make sure that all the first lines have the same, identical indentation. Is this done in some other way? I originally had Tabs but they went far into the line. In the example, lines 1, 2, 4, and 7 are all correct and begin at the same indentation, but 3 and 5 don’t…there’s more space there, pushing the line to start further into the page.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[ajlittoz]

This site uses HTML where multiple spaces are merged into a single one. Consequently your example does not show what you mean. Edit your question to add 4 initial spaces to every lines of your example. Make sure there are empty paragraphs (double Enter) before and after to isolate the example.

[mikekaganski]

… or just select the text ant press “pre-formatted text” button on the toolbar. It will appear like this:

   "Move to the right!" I said, ducking.
   "Okay!" he shouted back.
     "Now move to the left!"
   "Done."
        Eventually, the platoon made it past the trip wires and came out to a wide field, once a rice paddy.  Davis took out a pack of cigarettes and lit up.
   Suddenly, there was a noise.

[thesun]

Thank you, Mike; I edited it.

[ajlittoz]

From your workflow description, I bet you are quite a newbie for text processing application, i.e. you apply stylistic variations manually using menu commands, toolbar buttons or keyboard equivalents (like Ctrl+B for bold). This manual application is called direct formatting and is the cause of many later difficulties.

The intended workflow of Writer is the use of styles. The most frequent categories are page styles (to describe the general look of the page, including its margins, header and footer), paragraph styles (to describe paragraph properties like font face and size, indents = additional margins to the page margins, vertical spacing, …) and character styles (font attributes which override the paragraph attributes).

You are encouraged to download and read the Writer Guide to discover the power of styles and learn how to use it.

The main discourse in your document should be styled Text Body and not Default Style as is probably presently styled your text. Default Style is a “technical” style which defines attributes for all others.

Text Body can be customised to fit your needs: justified alignment and vertical spacing mainly.

• Make the side style-pane visible if not already there with F11. It opens with a view of the paragraph styles
• Locate Text Body, right-click on its name and Modify
• In Alignment tab, set Justified
• The Indents & Spacing tab contains what you need, change the settings (see below)
• When done, click OK

Select your paragraphs to become Text Body (leave aside those considered as headings or titles) and either double-click on Text Body name in the style-pane or select Text Body from the drop-down menu in the toolbar.

Indents & Spacing settings:

The indents allow you to add more widths to the page horizontal margins for this paragraph style (this means you can play on this parameter in different paragraph styles to emphasise differences in significance of contents). The first line parameter is what you are looking for.

A first line indent must never be done with spaces because spaces can be expanded or shrinked for justification purpose and have thus no fixed width as you noted. It should also not be done with tabs because tabs are intended for tabular data and your first line in not part of a table.

Consequently, define what would be a nice-looking indent according to the paragraph width and font size. In Europe, an indentation of 1.0 to 1.5 cm is common.

Also, the spacing part allows to define the vertical distance separating this paragraph style from other paragraphs. Always use this settings instead of adding empty paragraphs. This uselessly complicates the structure of your document and may cause instability.

From your question, I understand some of your paragraphs need a first line indent and some don’t.

This can easily be handled by using several paragraph styles. Refer the Writer Guide to learn how to create your own styles.

To show the community your question has been answered, click the ✓ next to the correct answer, and “upvote” by clicking on the ^ arrow of any helpful answers. These are the mechanisms for communicating the quality of the Q&A on this site. Thanks!

[thesun]

Thank you so much. This exactly solved my problem and I appreciate the level of detail. Hopefully this will also help others out there with a similar situation.

[thesun]

(And to answer the “newbie” question, I am fairly up on using styles, but in this case the document is someone else’s and they’ve managed to do a lot of things wrong, some that I don’t know exactly what they’ve done or how to fix it. Much of it with directly applied formatting. So you are right about that, too!)