How to hide & unhide text & how to make 'Hide' button on toolbar.

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#1

I’m moving from MS Word to LibreOffice. Writer needs a ‘hide text’ button.

I have many documents that have hidden text. Purchase orders with notes to myself, notes from vendors and the such. In MS Word, I can hide and unhide just by selecting what I want hidden and then click the Hide button (or hit Ctrl-Shift-H). Hidden text displays a dotted line under it (if Options > Display is set to always show hidden text).

It took a while, but I found how to display hidden text in Writer (Tools > Options > [-] LibreOffice Writer > Formatting Aids, and tick the box for Hidden Text). Now when you need to see the hidden text, select the “¶” button or Ctrl-F10. This will toggle hidden text on and off (as well as other formatting marks). Hidden text will be shown as dotted underlined as in Word. BUT, It does not set or unset anything as hidden.

Writer obviously has the capacity to have and show hidden text, but not to easily hide and unhide specific text.

NOW, I need a tool, a button on the toolbar to toggle selected text hidden / unhidden. I’ve looked at all the choices for toolbar tools (right click the toolbar) and Hidden isn’t there.

btw, I’m using LibreOffice 6.0, and Writer says it’s 6.0.5.2

#4

Exactly the problem I have, and the suggestion offered is missing the issue, that an easy way is needed to format as hidden/visible, which in Word is very easy.
Namely a command that is assignable to keyboard/toolbar.
The solution will need to be a Macro but misses that such a command should be readily available for use…

#6

Writer is based on the very promising concept of styles which goes far beyond what is offered in Word. Word has a vague notion of paragraph styles, just called styles because there are none others. Writer in addition provides character, page, frame and list styles,

In your case, you need to defined a character style named Hidden where the hidden attribute is ticked in the Font Effects tab of the configuration dialog. This user-style can be attached to a keyboard shortcut of your choice with Tools>Customize. This will hide the selected run of characters. To unhide, you need to define another shortcut fo No Character Style.

Since you switch from Word, I highly recommend you read the introductory Writer Guide to discover how different Writer is from Word and to get an idea about what can be done with styles.

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#7

This solution works sufficiently for me (I have tried out for another reason some days ago). It would be an enormous enhancement if one could generate some icons in the format bar for these purposes.

#8

I am generally very dubious about icons/buttons in the toolbars because you don’t know exactly what’s under the hood. The pitfall to avoid is direct formatting. Present buttons add direct formatting (because Word does so!). If you can replace action in such buttons by a style application, I don’t object. The main problem with style application (from a newbie point of view) is the non-toggling effect. This is why you need a “reset all” button/keyboard to revert to “neutral” state, but this removes all applied styles (at least character ones).

#2

Format, Character, Font Effects: Hidden

LibreOffice Writer Version: 6.4.3.2 (x64)

Note: Text display cannot be toggled with the Toggle Formatting Marks command like MS Word as described in the question.

#3

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=133209

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