How to add column count to Writer status bar

[mhoram]

Hi,

I am running LibreOffice 7.3 on Debian Linux 12 Bookworm. Is there any way to have the Writer status bar display the column that the cursor is currently in ? I need this for text alignment purposes.

mhoram

[fpy]

@mhoram

column […] text alignment

you mean character count ?

Set a character limit for a line

The Writer is not a pure text editor, and the most of fonts have not monospace characters. The “limit” for a line are the margins in the Writer, but not some numeric value of the characters. If you want character number limits, the you must use a pure text editor software.

[ajlittoz]

@mhoram

I need this for text alignment purposes.

In Writer, alignment is never based on inserting characters. As already mentioned, most fonts provide “proportional” characters, i.e. every glyph has its own specific width. You’ll never achieve horizontal alignment by adding non-printing characters because they won’t have the same width as the visible characters in the line above. And particularly don’t rely on spaces. Spaces, as glyphs, are removed from the output and replaced by positioning directives allowing justification (“spaces” are expanded or, in a future enhancement of the algorithm, shrinked).

Alignment is done with Tab to move following characters to the next tab stop position. But, once again, this will give the expected result only when your text is tabular “by nature”. There are other solutions for paragraph by playing on indents (left and first line). For full tabular data, use a table (note that each table cell behaves as a sub-document and you may face other alignment issues.

For best advice, edit your question to describe your use case and the expected result.