I have created a custom Tab Stop on the Ruler. Problem is, if I select the Increase Indent button, the Indent ignores the marking on the Ruler.
How do I modify the Increase Indent behaviour to match the Tab Stops?
I want the setting to apply to all Indents in document (or all in that Paragraph Style), not just the selected Paragraph.
The solution is to modify the paragraph style you applied to your text. In principle, this is Body Text.
If the main tool bar displays Default Paragraph Style, then you are using Writer in full manual mode which is extremely user-unfriendly, making tuning and other embellishments tedious?
Note that indents and tab stops are independent. Consequently, you can’t synchronise indents with tab stops, even less with implicit evenly-spaced stops.
But since you are mentioning “tab”, I assume you have indented the first line of paragraphs with a Tab to create “alinea space”. You should not do it that way.
Make sure that no direct formatting, DF, (including definition of first line indent) is in effect on the paragraphs you want to change because DF takes precedence over styles. Eventually, Format>Clear direct formatting or Ctl+M.
Open the configuration dialog for the style you want to customise and go to Indents & Spacing tab.
While you are in this tab, pay attention to Spacing parameters: they control vertical spacing above and below the paragraph. The parameters should be used instead of using empty paragraphs to vertically space. Don’t hesitate to set both values. A single Below distance has not the same effect as the same distance as the sum of Above and Below. You won’t see the difference on a text made of a single category of paragraphs (same style everywhere) but it is significant when you have different styles, e.g. a heading followed by text. Setting carefully both allows to achieve results without the use of empty paragraphs.
For more precise and targeted suggestions, mention OS name, exact LO version and save format.
Hi, thanks very much for your reply.
Indeed, originally I used Body Text as the paragraph style. In Styles > Edit Style, I set the spacing parameters to 0.00 cm. If I change Indent > Before Text, all the paragraphs change, regardless of whether they had an Increased Indent, or not. So that is not a viable solution.
After trying that, I created a New paragraph style inherited from Body Text. Spacing set to 0.00cm, Indent before initially set to 0.1 cm , then tried at 0.2 cm, and same problem occurred. So that is also not a viable solution.
Clearing Direct Formatting makes no difference. I have also tried starting again in a new document, and again there is no solution.
OS = Windows 11
LO Ver = 25.8.1.1
Is there anything else I can try?
Attach a reduced sample file (1 or 2 pages) so that I can have a look at your formatting.
Okay, here is a sample. It is an Index for a game, intended for personal use.
Sample Game Rulebook Index.odt (41.4 KB)
The Indents between “Psionics”, and “Awareness” and “Enhanced Endurance” are too massive, hence that is why I wanted to modify it.
Thanks for looking.
This looks like an alphabetical index with two “hierarchical keys”. I don’t know how you created it. Built-in Alphabetical Index can manage this. Each level in the index will be styled Index 1 to Index 3. Through indents parameters (before text and first line indent) you can achieve your layout without the manual addition of tab characters. And you page numbers can be right-aligned, again without manual intervention.
Your main problem is you used a single paragraph style Index Text for all levels instead of assigning different styles (because your “lines” have not the same significance: first key, second key and entry). This forced you to apply direct formatting to differentiate levels. And this DF overrides what is in the style.
Contrary to what you wrote above, when I change the indent in the style, only paragraph at first level in your index, i.e. first key paragraphs are affected because DF in other levels overrides the change in the style.
Don’t try to fix your index. Instead, rebuild it using the alphabetical index feature so that levels are styled differently.
If your index is already generated with the built-in feature, restore the Styles tab to its factory setting, i.e. Index n to levels 1-3.
I don’t know the meaning of the bold and italic page numbers. This implies manual patching of the index. Try to avoid this.
Yes, the Index is totally manually produced because I didn’t think I could do it automatically: Since I don’t have editable rights to the original (PDF) document, my Index is a complete separate standalone document. Hence, no Document Indexer is going to work without the original main text.
My Index conventions:
Bold page numbers - main topic or definition of entry
Normal page number - entry cross-reference
Italic page number - entry appears as chart, tabulated data or worksheet data.
If I cannot do Index automatically, then - yes - maybe my main problem is the use of single paragraph style. Maybe I could do Index Text1, Index Text2 and Index Text3 custom styles to differentiate three levels of Index
I tried Justified text for the document, but that went wrong when using tabs or indents. I could try right justified, as I never used that before.
Yes, sorry. The text I sent has DF because I couldn’t get edit style to work as the desired method for indents. If I were to create different custom paragraph styles, then I wouldn’t need DF. That is a good idea.
Use built-in Index n and customise them.
Index 1 will have no indent. I assume it contains only short level-1 keys which will never exceed one line. Such a “key” has no page number; so, no need to define tab stop and keep left alignment. Since it opens a group of “references”, give it a moderate spacing above paragraph.
To cope with “See xxx”, you can define a right-aligned tab stop at right indent with dot-leader line. The leader line will appear only if you press Tab.
Index 2 has a left indent with a negative first line indent half of it. It is left-aligned. Define the same tab stop as in Index 1. If your page numbers overflow what is left in the line, they’ll automatically overflow right-aligned. Set a smaller spacing above to visually delimit the group of entries under the level-2 “key”.
Index 3 has the same configuration as Index 2, save for a larger left indent.
A more elaborate configuration would be to start with Index 1 as suggested but with a left indent and a negative first line indent of the same value. Index 2 is derived from Index 1 where you override left and first line indents and spacing above. Index 3 is derived from Index 2 where you override only left indent and spacing above.
When you modify Index 1 (font face, size, …), the changes are also forwarded to the other styles. You only need to modify only one.
Don’t direct format your main topic, chart, … Instead define 2 character styles Main or Def and Chart or Table for bold and italic respectively. Don’t change face or size: as long as you don’t “touch” them, the result will be what is defined in the paragraph style (i.e. what you see in the character style configuration dialog is meaningless until you click it with the mouse; untouched attributes are “transparent”).
Once again the advantage of targeted character styles is to allow to tune your formatting “centrally” without hunting for occurrences.