The View/Display Grid option in Writer does not appear to do anything in Mac OS Catalina.
Is additional add on required?
The grid is made of very small dots in light gray which may not be easily visible on the white page background.
You can increase contrast with Tools>Options, LibreOffice>Application Colors, Text Document, Grid, changing from Automatic to some darker colour.
Under MacOS, Tools>Options may be somewhere else, where “Preferences” are usually located.
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Very small is an understatement. My eyes are getting too old for this.
The location on the Mac is LibreOffice Preferences LibreOffice Application Colors so similar really.
Changed grid to black but strangely they are more obvious at entire page zoom than page width or greater zoom.
I had also difficulty seeing the grid at first. I thought there was dust on my screen. And, yes, zooming in does not help.
Anyway, I don’t see the usefulness of the grid in Writer unless you position elements manually. But then, this means dreaded direct formatting. There are much better, reliable and safer ways of positioning with styles and object properties. For double-sided text, consider the register true option.
I am afraid I am not very familiar with LibreOffice and the use of the grid is that recommended in the Writer User Guide Forms section.
I am trying to draft a form with fields to be completed by the user having downloaded a pdf export.
Not sure what direct formatting actually means. I have been unable to find the means of changing form field displayed label text. Not however part of my original query so must keep working on it.
Might have to turn the PC on again and revert to MS Word!
To be honest, I consider Writer is first dedicated to document formatting. Form design (and yes, the grid is useful there to coarse position elements) has been added as a convenience but a form does not fit well in the general text flow scheme. It is considered “fashionable” these days but I’d recommend using other tools for that, even HTML design applications.
Possible workaround: Draw your grid (or whatever you want as guide objects) into a SVG file and set that as page background (Page Style->Area->Image->Add/Import). Use “custom position/size”, “scale 100%” and position “top left”. Include suitable X/Y offsets in your SVG file so it lines up with your page margins.
You can “turn off” the guides display by setting its transparency to 100% – there’s no toggle under the “view” main menu. Caveat: The background graphics breaks web view, even when it’s invisible (at 100% transparency).