How to create a stuffed textblock

English
#1

There is a need to create a page layout that is filled to it cannot be “changed”
The Page should be filled.

Any sentence that is not equal to the total width needs to filled as well.

The text needs to be mono spaced font, and the page needs to be filled.
with single space between the words. Left justified.
Example:

this is an example text
where there is a-------
filling until s the end
of a line--------------
-----------------------
1. item list-----------
2. also has filling----

Any empty line needs to be filled until the right page margin.

1 Like
#2

To the best of my knowledge, this can’t be done presently with styles. There is a weak solution for the last line where you could type a tab after the last character. Tab stop would be set at right margin with a dash to create a leading line. However, this does nothing for the intermediate lines in the paragraph.

I assume you’re preparing some legal paper where no addition must be possible after printing. You could have a look to numerically signed documents (both odt and pdf), but this does not show on a print.

#3

You guessed right, the crux is the document is not electronic, it is the print that needs the guard.
It just needs to be prepared in libreoffice…
I couldn’t find it, so i have to guess it currently can’t be done other than by hand add dashes.
The tab would add the same issue as it also needs to be inside a sentence. AFAIK no hyphenation is done. Long words also should cause mid sentence dashes.

Maybe something to ad as option to paragraph formatting?

#4

Seems something can be simulated with paragraph options.

image
image1212×594 46.8 KB

1 Like
#5

How about fill the page background to the margins with a pattern and then specify that all styles for that document have white highlight?

  1. Open a new blank document. Right click on page and select page style:
    1. In Page tab, untick the box Background covers margins
    2. In Area tab, select Pattern and then choose a suitable pattern to fill the background. OK
  2. In the Sidebar in Styles, right click Default Paragraph Style and select Edit style
  3. In the dialogue box, select Highlighting tab and then click Colour. Select White and OK
  4. You can set Default Paragraph style to a monospaced font so all paragraph styles except Heading are mono-spaced or you could just set just Body Text as I have for the sample. Set Body Text to Single line spacing so the white highlighting joins to previous line.
  5. Click File > Templates > Save as template

StuffedTextBlock_126667.odt (39.6 KB)

For higher security, you could create a more complex pattern, add it as page background in the image and tile it

3 Likes
#6

@EarnestAl Very good suggestion!

#7

Ah, but not new. I remembered a similar question but couldn’t find it. It was this one which appears to be a team effort How to specify “vertical fill” for empty lines before page breaks?

#8

I completely forgot this question which clearly answers the present one. Thanks for refreshing my failing memory (age disaster!).

#17

Or the paragraph area.

#9

As I was interested by the challenge, I made experiments. I followed two tracks:

  • page background for simple “stuffing”
  • background frame for more versatile effects, such as “no intentional text here” watermark in blank spaces

This idea is to simulate pre-printed stationery. You are no longer limited to monospaced text. You can also use all highlighting Writer facilities such as font change, colour, alignment, …

My experiment was conducted with three paragraph styles:

  • Justified Body displaying a serif font, paragraph background set to white, justified so that text will extend from margin to margin, completely hiding the background
    However, the background is defined for the paragraph bounding rectangle. Therefore, end of the last line remains white. To cope with this, a tab at right margin with a dashed leader line is created. You just hit Tab after the last character in the last line to cross out it.
  • Jagged Body left-aligned with character highlighting (instead of paragraph background)
  • Preformatted Text, similar to Jagged Body, except it displays a monospaced font

But, IMHO, this does not prevent a very meticulous fraud to glue extra text over background and photocopy the forged page.

Page background

I created a Checkered Page page style with a pattern covering only text area. This pattern can be extended to cover the whole page but most printers have a “mechanical feeding margin” which cannot be printed so that gears and other pressure rollers are not clogged by ink or toner. This will however result in a rather ugly look.

  • Justified Text is quite satisfactory.
  • Jagged Text exhibit a throbbing effect between the vertical pattern frequency and line spacing because character highlighting does not cover the leading between lines of text. It could be compensated by reducing the leading in the paragraph style configuration but this makes text hard to read.
  • Preformatted Text is vulnerable to the same “Moiré” effect but the monospace font used here (Liberation Mono) seems to define a higher glyph rectangle than the serif font, seemingly preventing the effect. It is shown for comparison with what you do presently.

Background frame

To provide more possibilities, I created a Watermarked Page with a very tiny header enabled. This header is forced to fixed minimal height, i.e. 0.1 cm with no spacing. Of course, if you have a need for a header, you can use it in the usual way for its intended purpose. The header paragraph is styled Invisible where font size is set to 2pt (the absolute minimum in Writer) and spacing above and below at 0 cm.

A text frame is anchored to the header paragraph. Size is page size minus the margins, centred inside page text area. The frame contains some text (in this example “The Document Foundation”, but can be “The Acme Company, unincorporated” or “Ministry of Fancy Documentation - form 0000”) styled Watermark Text. This paragraph style allows for adjustments such as line spacing and font colour.

Frame style Watermark hosts all properties of the frame: its position and, most important, its Wrap properties: Through, In background and Allow overlap. Be aware that, should you edit frame contents, you must remove temporarily background or overlap to be able to click and select the frame.

The results are the same as above, except use of the frame reveals an undocumented behaviour relative to “background”. It looks like a frame wrapped In background is in fact z-sorted between paragraph background and character layer. Thus, paragraph background is made invisible and replaced by frame background which is not “transparent” as would be expected. To compensate, I had to modify Justified Text to add white highlighting.

See AskLOStuffedText.odt (62.8 KB)

EDIT: Working more on the challenge, I discovered an horrible bug: tdf#168410

See this document: LOBug-BackgroundOrder.odt (32.7 KB)

1 Like
#10

Justified might mean one can add some text in the longer spaces or make plural of singular.

Nice bugfind though.

#12

Yes, but you fall into the bad and clumsy habit of typing two spaces after a full stop. This leaves a tiny possibility of doing the same. Note that this two-space-after-full-stop, inherited from the mechanical typewriter era, has been deprecated for more than 40 ears, even in the US where academics still teach and require it.

#11

Here is my attempt at a solution.
StuffedTextOnWatermark.odt (15.2 KB)
Still some alignment issues on page 2

The next is better, it just demands the body text to be highligetd to hide the background
StuffedTextOnWatermark2.odt (16.3 KB)

1 Like
#13

Fine alignment is needed only if you want to simulate manual typing inline. IMHO, the ultimate goal is to clearly identify limits of original text. Thus any predictable pattern is acceptable. But any solution is not totally forge-proof: a wide dashed line offers the possibility to glue a typed tape over the dashes.

#14

Thanks all for the thinking along.

In the end the document, a codicil (new info), needs to be hand written…

The solutions do work more or less as intended.
The hardest task what is the correct solution here?

#15

Take legal advice on that!

#16

That was after legal advice. There is not a lot of wiggle-room for DIY here. (NL)
Alternatively visit a notary that can make it a testament (Legal binding document, also stored in a central register). That document does have the format discussed here.

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