Change Default (Style) Bullets and Numbering, Position and Spacing, Numbering Alignment, Right

[Moehinder]

Can someone please help me, in plain English, to understand how to change the Default setting for:

Bullets and Numbering => Position and Spacing => Numbering Alignment, Right

I have spent a lot of time trying to find a plain-English explanation as to how to set the Numbering Alignment to: Right as the Default. I understand this has something to do with Styles. I don’t want to have to open a Libreoffice Writer doc and then load some style. I just want to seamlessly change the Default setting to Right for Numbering Alignment. Please show me the step-by-step approach. Please. So, when I open any new Libreoffice Writer doc, the Default Style will always have Numbering or Bulleted Lists to always be: Position => Numbering Alignment: Right.
Every explanation I’ve read online is convoluted, confusing, and not clear. This shouldn’t be so hard to figure out.

Thanks, John

[ajlittoz]

Unfortunately your question is ambiguous.

Behaviour of bullets and numbers somehow departs from what other “objects”, notably text, do. I am afraid that you don’t understand what Numbering Alignment > Right does.

Parameter Aligned at defines a reference position. Think of it as a vertical axis or a vertical. guideline. Then Numbering alignment tells where this virtual axis is relative to the number. Left means the axis is at left of number (in other words, the number is on the right of the axis; this is quite troublesome, isn’t it?).

When you ask for “Numbering Alignment, Right”, do you mean you want the least significant digit of all numbers to be aligned on the same vertical, achieving what we call right-aligned in text? Then, yes, Numbering alignment must be set to Right so that the number will expand to the left.

But … Format>Bullets & Numbering is a bad compatibility feature. It has been offered as a quick and dirty service for those who come from Word where text structuring abstraction is poor or non-existent. The feature, to be as much compatible as possible with Word, is a kind of one-size-fits-all service able to format all lists in a document. and to do that, it is a “fire-and-forget” service. As soon as you leave a list occurrence, everything is reset so that the next list occurrence is not biaised by the previous one.

Another consequence of this implementation is the configuration is not saved, neither in the document nor in the user profile.

So, what is the solution? … Learn how to use styles. Styles are ubiquitous in Writer. One of categories is called list styles. The name is not the best one. List styles only control the aspect of the bullet/numbering and take over the indent of the paragraph style on the side where the number appears (left for LTR languages, right for RTL scripts).

You can either customise a built-in list style (click on the fifth icon in the side style pane toolbar) or create your own. If you have several semantically distinct lists, create as many list styles.

To make your list styles known by default, create them in a blank document (based on the default template or any template of your taste) and save it as a template. Then make it your default template (this is why I recommended to base it on your current preferred template).

PS: when asking here, always mention OS name, LO version and save format. For instance, the solution given here won’t work if your documents are save .docx because there is nothing like list styles in DOCX.

[Glossy428]

You know a lot about this topic. How is it that there is a “default” button in the Position tab of Bullets and Numbering, if the settings go away and do not persist in other documents when using bullets and numbering? Default to a specific style? I confess that Styles in Libre Office has defeated me multiple times, in that I stop using L.O. and go check out another word processor. Doesn’t Styles remain obscure to a lot of people? I have simple needs, no interest in templates at all. I would pay for Word, if Onedrive would not hound me.

[ajlittoz]

You draw my attention on this Default button I never noticed/used. I experimented a bit and it remains a mystery for me. It looks like it resets Format>Bullets & Numbering to “factory” defaults. But this button is also present in list styles. But I don’t understand what it does here: some settings are not reset at all after modification and others don’t revert to the initial value (they take values unrelated to the present style nor to Format>Bullets & Numbering. Built-in help is of no help about it.

@Glossy428

Doesn’t Styles remain obscure to a lot of people?

Perhaps because they never introspected about the fundamentals of writing a document. There are two aspects here.

• The author has a message to send. The main task is to convey significance to a potential reader. Any other factor is secondary.
• The “artist” or formatter tries to make the document look nice so that the reader is inclined to read it.

Styles are the “glue” between these two aspects.

From the author’s point of view, style names are a semantic markup about the semantics of the object (page, paragraph, character – read: “word” --, list, frame) like Body Text, Quotation, Emphasis, Example, Definition, … In some sense, an author does not care about the final representation (look) of the text.

The “artist” will configure the used styles to give a visual “rhythm” to the document by defining margins, spacing, size, weight, using font faces and variants to highlight the semantic differences across the various part of the document.

Of course, you don’t reinvent the wheel for every document. As an author, you have habits and preferences. Your documents adopt a consistent common look. You can record your preferred “artistic” choices in a template so that you can focus on the author part, relying on your saved “artistic” choices.

Styles operate in layers:

• page defines the general geometry of the page and other properties such as the presence of header/footer and the kind of page number (none, numeric, alphabetic)
• paragraph in its turn defines the geometry of the paragraph (spacing and indent mainly) and text flow properties (alignment, relation with previous and next paragraphs, hyphenation, page break, …)
  Since it would not be user-friendly to necessitate systematically to manually apply a character style, usually always the same, in addition to a paragraph style, it contains a somehow reduced version of a character style to be applied whenever this paragraph style is selected.
• character defines the typographical properties of text: font face, size, weight, colour, position, …
• list is not the best name for it because it does not create a “list of items”; it simply controls the numbering and, consequently, has to be applied to a paragraph or associated to a paragraph style to add the number or bullet
• frame is used to control the interaction between “decorations” (images, in-text or margin notes) with main text
  This category is not fully rigorously specified and suffers many instabilities. It is the most difficult to tame and master. It really requires a lot of attention to achieve the expected (reliable, deterministic and stable) result.

These are the tools at your disposal to design “professional” documents. But you can also create quick’n’dirty ones with direct formatting (DF), i.e. applying manually attributes (bold, italic, size, font face, spacing, …) with the mouse, button or keyboard shortcuts without styles. You must however be aware that DF takes precedence over styles. You then face difficulties when you mix styles and DF. I don’t say you should not use DF, but do it with caution. There are two traps in Writer: writing only with DF (document becomes impossible to manage) and only with styles (too many styles to maintain and tune). Some DF is perfectly legitimate, e.g. actions which occur only once or a very limited number of times.