For a column management enhancement in LibreOffice Writer

[abcd-international]

Hi,
With Writer, when a document (or a section) has several columns, the typed in text — as it reaches the end of a column— continues on the top of next column, same page. And so on until the end of the last column, where it continues to the top of next page, first column.

However, there are cases where this management is inappropriate and highly undesirable. Example: when each column is in a different language, and is the translation of the other. In these cases, each end of a column must continue at the beginning of the next page, same column. The text never overflows from one column to another on the same page.

My suggestion is that, in the panel where we configure the columns (number, width, separation, etc.), we could indicate with a check box how the text is managed : in “classic” mode or in “independent columns” mode.

I don’t remember ever seeing this feature in other word processors, and it would be a definite “+” for LibreOffice Writer.

Pierre

[robleyd]

What you want seems to be a table with the required number of columns.

[Lupp]

In addition to what @robleyd stated I would emphasize the need of creating “register alignment” for subdivisions of your text related to its translation(s).
The following example shows how I did it - mostly when commenting instead of translating.
disask104982ColumnsWithRelatedContents.odt (48.2 KB)

Since the page wrapping for tables always is cellwise you also get kept the left-right relation across page breaks.

[ajlittoz]

This question has already been asked here and I’ll give the same answer.

The “multi-column” feature is an implementation of “newspaper flow” where you rightly point out text flow from one column to the next.

The example you quote (two-column text where each one is a translation of the other; but we can generalise it to documents where text in each column is related to the other(s) – we can have more than 2) is more complex.

You can’t flow arbitrarily text in each column as if they were independent. In this case you have two separate documents. This is a weird layout but after all, why not?

In the case of translation or comments, text can’t develop arbitrarily but must remain connected. When translated, paragraphs have not the same size because of the “redundancy properties” of their respective spellings. When a paragraph starts in a column, the corresponding one in the other must start at the same location. This means both text must be synchronised in some way.

Presently, the only possibility in Writer is a table. The checkpoint is a cell. Cells guarantee this synchronisation. Tables can split between rows when a page break is met. If you configure your table adequately, you can relax this rule so that cells will split at page break.

However, there is a cost: you must create one row whenever you text has a paragraph break. Not very user-friendly but you control exactly where the checkpoint is.