Blockquote in LO Writer?

[davidlee]

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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

We interrupt this “lorem ipsum” to bring you a markdown blockquote, featuring a vertical bar down the left-hand side. Here in ask.libreoffice.org it is simply “blockquote”. Nice and easy.

And it allows multiple paragraphs like this, etc.

Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit…

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I’m new to doing things properly in LO. But I didn’t find a way, such as the above “blockquote” example, to do the same sort of thing in LO. Some flexibility in displaying the LH would be a neat bonus, as would an option for an RH bar, and tweaking the spacing around the inserted material.

I did some playing around with a frame. And superficially that gave the appearance of being moderately successful. BUT:

• There didn’t seem to be any “style” set up for doing multiple instances of such a frame. There may not be any, and that itself may be explained by…
• Other conversations here on ask... suggest avoiding frames, and for various reasons (and I tend to agree with them)

Given that frames are not the ideal way to do it (and my playing already found a couple of problems, reinforcing the “don’t use frames for this” advice)…

Is there an approved LO structural mechanism to insert such blockquote-like blocks of structured text? (I’m new; I may well have missed the obvious…)

[ajlittoz]

Every paragraph style (indeed, any style category) can be decorated with borders. Each edge can be set independently from the others. Therefore to have a vertical bar at left, you only set the left border.

Customise built Block Quotation, a paragraph style intended to be applied to block quotes.

Go to its Borders tab:

• click at left of the gray square (representing paragraph text) in the small mockup of paragraph formatting
• choose your preferred style, colour and thickness for the bar
• untick Synchronise in Padding and set the Left distance between the bar and text
• press OK

All you have to do now is to apply this Block Quotation style on your paragraph. However, it is probably wise to clear direct formatting before applying (because direct formatting takes precedence over style) to avoid conflicts.

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@davidlee

I did some playing around with a frame.

Frames are very difficult to tame and usually newbies tend to have wrong ideas about them. Frames create “secondary documents”, an independent sub-document in your main flow. So if what you want to enclose in borders is part of your main topic, a frame is a bad choice.

The main problems with frames are the anchor (the location in the document to which they are attached and they’ll follow across editing) and the position within the page relative to the anchor. Newcomers confuse both notions and the result is a mess.

To make things even worse, frames are extremely sensitive to direct formatting (DF) and it is next to impossible to get rid of frame DF once it is there.

@davidlee

There didn’t seem to be any “style” set up for doing multiple instances of such a frame.

If you mean repetitive application of same geometric properties (and a few others), this is done with a frame style. But once again, beware of DF. DF spoils and damages formatting and it is a real nightmare with frames.

In case of fast creation of another occurrence of a specific frame, the easiest solution is to record the styled frame in an AutoText entry.

@davidlee

Other conversations here on ask... suggest avoiding frames

I am considered as the ultimate Writer guru and I am probably the one you’re blaming for this advice.

Use frames only once you understand what they are intended for: a short side sub-document, independent from the main flow (the emphasised word is important; don’t try to create interactions between your main flow and text inside a frame: their scanning order e.g. when collecting TOC, is not specified and you frequently get sequence order (rather out-of-order) surprises). Your main flow must keep its significance and consistency if you don’t read the frames or hide them.

Above all, don’t use them for their graphical effects (borders, background, …) on elements of the main flow. I repeat: main flow and frames are logically independent. There are many other ways to add graphical decorations on main text with styles (paragraph and character mainly).

[davidlee]

“Block Quotation” certainly feels a better route than hacking frames. Thanks.

But the enclosed text also seems to be constrained to a single style. I should have mentioned in my original message that I’m also after a block-like structure that can include two or more paragraph styles. Imagine taking a multi-style collection of main-flow paragraphs and nesting that collection inside a block-like structure.

My real-life work-in-progress example is putting into LibreOffice something I already have on my website (which does this nesting of a multi-style collection via careful use of CSS). At the link below, the main text is obviously on the light blue background. But you’ll also see quotations and panels, etc. on white backgrounds, and often including two or more different elements; examples are the “Twelfth Night” quote and the item shortly after the “Qinah…” subheading.

ServiceMusic: Lamentations: introducing this version

Is there a blockquote-like mechanism that can include (nest) two or more paragraph styles? Or that can cleanly achieve that, preferably by styling?

[ajlittoz]

@davidlee

But you’ll also see quotations and panels, etc. on white backgrounds, and often including two or more different elements; examples are the “Twelfth Night” quote and the item shortly after the “Qinah…” subheading.

Twelth Night, As Simple As ABC and Introduction to Lamentations can only be implemented with frames since they appear to be “side” annotations to main text (they can be read independently or completely skipped).

Use a single frame style anchored to paragraph or character (depending on the “precision” of the reference) with position flushed to right margin and Keep inside text boundaries so that it is automatically adjusted if you’re too close to top or bottom margin. Keep your positioning directives as generic as possible so that the style works with contents of various sizes without problems.

@davidlee

Is there a blockquote-like mechanism that can include (nest) two or more paragraph styles? Or that can cleanly achieve that, preferably by styling?

Your “Lam” quotations are part of the main text, thus no need for frames. They will indeed need at least two paragraph styles: one for for the verses, one for the “signature” (or location within the book). The only difficulty here is to get a common border across different styles. This is done with careful setting for indents (they must be rigorously the same) in Indents & Spacing and border merging in Borders.