What is the best way to insert a block of text (remark or aside) with page width? Table, section, frame, or something else?
I tried paragraph style, but it got messed up when I added a bulleted list.
I just read the question Frames vs Text Boxes. What about Sections vs. Frames? What are the uses, advantages, etc. of each?
Frame as character seems to work, but section can break and span several pages. Is there a way frames can also break between pages?
Your question makes sense only if you need a common border around a sequence of several paragraphs with different indent properties, like:
+----------------------------+
| My remark with list items: |
| Ă— item 1 |
| Ă— item 2 |
| Conclusion |
+----------------------------+
If there is no common border, just go ahead with standard paragraphs with adequate paragraph styles.
As a general rule, avoid frames, tables and sections when they are not strictly necessary as they complicate document structure and may in extreme circumstances make it unstable. Don’t use text boxes outside forms. Text boxes are graphical objects which bear no relation with text (are then completely external and alien to it) and have limited formatting possibility (because they aren’t really text).
What is said for borders is also valid for background.
Writer can merge borders when adjacent paragraphs have the same indent distances. This rules out the merging possibility when you have a list in the sequence unless you very carefully tune the list style governing the bullet/number geometry. This excludes in practice lists created by direct formatting, i.e. those created by pressing the toolbar buttons or Format>Bullet & Numbering.
The key to the problem is to set the same left indent in all paragraphs involved in the remark. For “standard” paragraphs, set the Before text parameter in Indents & Spacing. For list items, this parameter is taken over by the list style where you must set Aligned at to the same value. This prohibits indenting multi-level lists with per-level distances.
Leave right indent at zero! because there is no way to adjust it for a list item (Writer is unable to handle it and this messes up your layout).
There is another solution preserving text flow and semantic ordering: a specific section. Unfortunately, sections are not controlled by a style category: there is no “section style”, meaning you’ll have to do everything manually for every remark block. In addition a section has no border. Consequently you must replace the border by a specific light background. You can’t either specify some background padding around the text.
AskLOCommonBorder.odt (47.2 KB)
Thank you! That is precisely the case.
Could you please confirm what the last sentence means? I do not entirely understand it.
A section has no borders, only a background. I cannot specify background padding around the text [within the section]?
There were two possible solutions to your problem:
However, section are really meant primarily to change temporarily the number of columns in an otherwise continuous flow of text. Since the goal is to change the number of columns, a border doesn’t make sense (there is an ambiguity about that: should the border be drawn around the whole section or around each columns? Note that this is irrelevant in the 1-column case). There are other issues with section. You can’t specify spacing above and below the section to clearly separate it from the rest of the document. Spacing above for the first paragraph in a column is not honoured. In the end, background leads to an ugly non-user-controllable result (my taste, you opinion may differ). This adds to the reasons to avoid sections when they are not necessary.
This makes me think there may be a third possibility to your question I haven’t explored: a footnote with several paragraphs. You just have to be careful with the first paragraph containing the note number. But, you don’t really need a border since the note is clearly set apart from the main text. Whether your remark is inline with text or in a footnote simply depends on the importance of the rematk: must-be-read or auxiliary information.
I would still prefer a paragraph style because it doesn’t interfere with the flow of the text.
Section and frame as character seem able to achieve the same effect. (Section does not seem to have borders though.)
Section and paragraph style allow the text to be broken between pages. Is there a way frame can do the same?
No, a frame is strictly limited to one page: it is an atomic “container”.
There are linked frames. To use them in the case of needing more than one page of “parallel text”, however, may require some handiwork (or automation by user code - oh dear!). Linked frames I would only take in account if a logical/functional connection requires a kind of secondary text flow.
For simplicity sake, I didn’t mention this feature. Anyway, since you can’t predict the volume of text in such context (remark with variable number of list items), linked frames won’t be the automatic solution because you’d have to allocate manually a next frame and you’d meet problems with the anchor point of the second frame when you edit your document (before the first frame). A tedious manual work is needed after each edit to make sure both frames are still positioned where they should (and also if a second is still needed!).
All in all, text frames should be reserved for what they are: some side text not part of the main flow (hence not part of the intended reading line by the author). They are like footnote but located somewhere else. Text should remain understandable when you skip them.
