How to create formatted Table of Figures using tabs before and after index number

I would like to auto format the Table of Figures so that the numbers align and the next lines can be outlined with the tabstop after the figure number.

E.g., below an example of the currend and wished formatting.

goedfout

This lower snap shot is manually edited and has tabstops before and after the index.

Is this possible?

Unfortunately this can’t be done automatically.

In principle, you control the line appearance with the Entries Structure & Formatting descriptors. But, the caption is collected as a whole without being decomposed into “label”, figure number and caption proper. This means you can’t insert “decorations” like tab characters between those.

The only thing you can do is to increase the left indent in Figure Index 1 paragraph style but not knowing where the caption will effectively begin (and it varies from one entry to the next because the figure number changes) will not set the indent relative to the beginning of the caption.

The Table of Contents does provide the opportunity to do use these decorations. So, I hoped that it could be done in the Table of Figures too.

Theoretically, apart from the “label” (Figure, Drawing, Table, …), all elements can be collected and offered as descriptors in the structure line. Alas, this is not the case.

Don’t check the Protected agains manual changes in Index Properties. Then it is possible to do manual changes in Table of Contents. So you can add Shift+Enter, and also spaces to the start of 2nd line. But every Actualization of Table of Contents will remove this manual changes.

So it is possible but only as last step in your document making.
tableOfContent.odt (26.0 kB)

Unfortunately, my documents are regularly reviewed en updated. So manually changing the index is too cumbersome.

I think I discovered it :-). Set the Indent for a Paragraph style you use for Table of Figures → set some value to Before text and for First line set the same but sub-zero value.

tableOfFigures.odt (100.7 kB)

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The default paragraph style for the table of figures is Figure Index 1. However, playing wit left indent (Before text) and First line will not result in the expected look because width of figure number is not fixed. What is really needed is at list a tab character after the figure number to align all captions.

Thanks a lot ajlittoz and KamilLanda for your efforts and trying to help. I think the formatting can not be done automatically. So, I submitted an enhancement request at bugzilla:

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148597

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