After upgrading to L0 7.3, I started seeing grey italicized square brackets before and sometimes after some of my paragraphs. I know how to hide these by disabling the View → Field shadings option.
What do these square brackets indicate?
Difficult to answer without knowing what you added in your text. So, attach a sample file.
Usually these dimmed square brackets tell you there is “extra meta data” associated with the sequence (bookmark, index, reference, …). Need to analyse your case to be more accurate.
I suspect they are bookmarks.
Insert>Bookmarks… menu.
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Thanks,
Yes, they were bookmarks. I have no idea how they got there in the first place.
The field marking for bookmarks was introduced in LibreOffice 7.0, see LibreOffice 7.0: Release Notes - The Document Foundation Wiki
If you have a table of contents then the bookmarks are generated automatically for the TOC
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I just encountered this field shading today. I went to the ‘View’ menu and started unchecking things until I saw that unchecking ‘Field Shading’ removed some of the renderings of square brackets in light gray color.
After reading this post, I went to Insert → Bookmarks menu and deleted all the bookmarks.
My question is how did these bookmarks get inserted in the first place? In my document I had no headings, no table of contents, no sections, nothing like that at all; I just typed text.
I had a References section where I manually typed [1] and so forth for my references. But when I opened up the document today I saw the gray square brackets to the left and slightly in a superscript position. I do not recall if I upgraded LibreOffice since I last opened this document.
I am now using Version 7.3.4.2.
Does anyone know how the bookmarks got into my file? Is it that LibreOffice automatically inserts bookmarks now?
A definitive answer goes through analysing your document. Even creating a TOC doesn’t insert bookmarks. Look at your Navigator to get a list of the existing bookmarks. Has your document ever been in contact with M$ Word? or saved .docx?
My document was created as an .odt document. It was never created FROM a .doc or .docx file.
There are no more bookmarks in my file as I deleted them all yesterday (see my previous post on this thread).
But the bookmarks that were there were associated with text that I typed manually; I created my document by typing everything in it.
For example I typed “Introduction” in ‘default paragraph style’ and manually put the text in bold. I did not change the style to ‘heading’ or anything else.
In other examples I manually typed text such as '[1] …" when citing references for my journal article. The light-gray square brackets appeared offset to the left and slightly up from text I typed.
It is highly unlikely that I did not notice any of this gray text (there were about 20 such manifestations of it and as many bookmarks) in the previous 17 versions of my article. Thus I suspect that somehow LibreOffice version 7.x is now creating bookmarks automatically.