Line break on number listed lines

[xycris]

hi community,

i am writing a thesis paper and this is my first time to fully utilise OOo Writer.

i am very happy with the product but i have some limitations to its usage for i am not sure if certain features exist.

what i am asking is a feature not existing with MS Word. it is basically a formatting issue i have with the format we use in our thesis. our thesis’ chapter heading is formatted like this (must be centre aligned):

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

what i want is Chapter 1 as a number format and INTRODUCTION as the content. i have not found a solution with Writer so far. this is how Writer and Word shows it:

Chapter 1 Introduction

or

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

the reason why i wanted to ask this is to be able to utilise the table of contents feature of the program later on when i will be completing the paper (and also other papers). in the table of contents hopefully it will appear in this manner:

Chapter 1

 INTRODUCTION ................................ 1
     Background of the Study ................. 3
     Scope and Limitation of the Study ....... 4

Chapter 2

 REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
 AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK .................... 5
     Related Literature and Studies .......... 6	

is this feature, of inserting a line breaker within the number formatted list without inserting another number, possible with Writer?

note: i don’t know why there seems to be some colour formatting in the example but somehow close to that.

thanks in advance

[xycris]

hi tohuwawohu,

thanks for the input. it is interesting that this feature is somehow not included in any word processing software. hopefully writer will be the first to have such feature. very useful for thesis and other formal write ups.

have a great day!

sincerely, xycris

[tohuwawohu]

The most straightforward solution would be to set some line breaks between the numbering an the content - but this doesn’t work, you can only set spaces or tab as separator.

There are different workarounds:

• Insert the line breaks manually after creating the TOC - big disadvantage: you need to do this every time the TOC is generated:
• Insert line breaks into heading lines (as “soft breaks”, SHIFT+RETURN). Disadvantage: Requires manual intervention, quite cumbersome;
• use different heading styles and use the “Next style” feature. IMHO this is the best workaround for this. It would require creating two styles, one for the “Chapter x” text, one for the content. You can set everything using style definitions, including that there should be a “heading content paragraph” after a “Chapter x” paragraph. You’ll have to adjust the TOC style so the “Chapter x” entries don’t contain a page number reference

[oweng]

The third point is not a “workaround”, it is the correct method of using markup to style the content. The original question is confusing in using this description: “Chapter 1 as a number format and INTRODUCTION as the content”. Both elements are headings and should be treated as such, as the third point in this answer indicates.