How do you indent only a highlighted area?

[bpaddock]

I am trying to indent a section of a document, effectively a Block Quote.

I select the target area then hit the “Increase Indent” tool bar button.

The highlighted area moves, sadly a bunch of crap that is not highlighted also indents.
Highlighted this unwanted crap and hitting “Decrees Indent” moves it ALL back.

I’ve gone so far as trying to insert a document with the desired indent and it still screws it up.

It is this non-intuitive behaviour that makes this program EXTREMELY frustrating to use.

[mikekaganski]

Indent is a paragraph’s property. When you apply it to selection, it applies to all paragraphs that are selected either fully or partly. So most likely you have some “unwanted crap” that is in the same paragraph as some of selected text is.

[bpaddock]

If I select three paragraphs I expect three paragraphs to indent, not the next four pages of other paragraphs.

I take it a paragraph is not the intuitive group of words terminated by blank lines? The things that are moving for some reason feel they are part of the selected paragraph?

[mikekaganski]

Paragraph is a group of characters separated by newlines (it is created by pressing Enter). There also exist other characters that break lines, but don’t start new paragraph: most notable is line beak that is created by Shift+Enter.

[mikekaganski]

By the way: too often people talking about intuitivity don’t realize that “intuitive” has nothing to do with “logical”, and is not a property of object you are talking about, but of yourself. It’s your experience and knowledge that makes something “intuitive” or not for you. If you have false expectations, anything not matching those false expectations would be counter-intuitive, however correct and logical.

[Platterbaff]

Try setting Writer to display more formatting marks including particularly “Paragraph end” “Breaks” and “Non breaking spaces”. Open the “Tools” menu, then select “Options” > “LibreOffice Writer”>”Formatting Aids” for a list of what you can have displayed.

Some people new to word-processors seem to find the marks off-putting at first, but I think they give a much clearer view of what is going on – a super-long paragraph such as you likely have is easily spotted.