If I may add my two cents to the discussion about “box model” …
It depends on how you use Draw.
When you use Draw to produce “printable” documents, i.e. documents relevant by themselves (remember Impress and Draw are two facets of the same component), then margins are important. It is not a matter of text flow. It only aims at guaranteeing that everything set in a “page” (or slide if you prefer) will be visible, no matter the output device, screen, printer, whatever.
On the contrary, when Draw is only a scratchpad containing decorations for documents created with other components, such as Writer or Calc, margins do not matter. The Draw document is only a storage medium allowing to design and edit illustrations which are then pasted somewhere else. Such a scratchpad is not intended to be “printed” or sent by itself.
Many of us give special use cases to margins. For example, we can use for marking an area we want to preserve in a final composition because we have a pre-impressed paper. Or maybe, we want to adjust it for marking (without drawing them) the cutting lines in a pre-production for cutting a specific format of paper.
Also, the printer is not the unique way to generate results with Draw. We would want to generate a PDF document, a PNG photo or SVG elements, that contemplate that zone.
Please, think that the best feature of Draw has always been the variety of uses given by users.
While you wait for bug 165770 to be resolved
Create a template along the lines of the sample I made in in comment 21 above. The margin is locked, visible but not printable.
Or you can revert to 24.8 or earlier which shows margins, possibly only if Writer also shows margins
While you wait for bug 165770 to be resolved
There is a strange coupling between Writer and Draw. Or rather, the controls for the various boundaries are common between the various components but not all components have UI for them.
If you want to see “page margins”:
- open a new text document
File>New>Text Document - in the text document,
View>Text Boundaries - get rid of the text document
Draw now shows the usable area within the page.
Fedora 41 with KDE Plasma desktop, LO 24.8.5.2
Doesn’t work here. (Version: 25.2.1.2 (X86_64), Windows 10)
Also, it’s called View>Boundaries (not: View>Text Boundaries)
The same here:
Version: 25.2.2.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 520(Build:2)
CPU threads: 12; OS: Linux 6.11; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: es-ES (es_ES.UTF-8); UI: es-ES
Ubuntu package version: 4:25.2.2-0ubuntu0.24.04.1~lo1
Calc: threaded
I DON’T EVEN HAVE THE “View” > “Boundaries”. Not in “View” menu nor Draw Settings Options.