Indents in paragraph styles not working

[chrishamill]

[LO 7.6, Win 11, docx]

DEFAULT PARAGRAPH STYLE has Before/After Text set to 0, First Line Indent is 6.4 mm. The first line will not indent. If I go to FORMAT>PARAGRAPH, it shows First Line Indent is 0 mm. If I change that to 6.4 mm and hit OK, it will not update.

BLOCK QUOTATION style has Before/After Text set to 6.4 mm, will not indent the Before Text, but will indent the After Text. If I change the Before Text setting using FORMAT>PARAGRAPH, it does indent the Before Text. But then double-clicking BLOCK QUOTATION in the right-side menu bar returns it to no indent of the Before Text.

[ajlittoz]

First remark: if you’re the creator of the document, why do you save it .docx? Any application will give its best when manipulating its own format(s). Using any other will result in conversion upon loading and saving. These conversions have cumulative effects which progressively damage document structure.

Second remark: if modifying a paragraph style has no effect, you probably have some direct formatting. Direct formatting always takes precedence over styles and therefore hides (masks out) the corresponding attribute in the styles (paragraph and character).

Third remark: never use Default Paragraph Style for any text. In Writer, this paragraph style is the ancestor of all others. All paragraph styles inherit directly or indirectly from Default Paragraph Style. This is a quick and handy way to change globally attributes, provided these attributes are not overridden in the style. Default Paragraph Style role (in Writer, once again) is to define user-preferences shared by all others. If you consider this style as a common discourse one and you customise it, you may be surprised by the unexpected (from you) side effects on other styles. This is probably different from Word model. In Writer, the “standard” discourse style is Body Text.

From what you describe above, you seem to practice extensively direct formatting.

If there is some other cause, it is not easy to tell. So, attach your document (or a reduced 1- or 2-page version) for analysis.

[chrishamill]

ajlittoz, thank you for the pointer about never using DEFAULT PARAGRAPH STYLE. Also for the recommendation to work in odt format.

This doc is UNFORMATTED, as you guided me earlier to Ctl+Shift+Alt+V the entire text of a problem doc into a new doc. So I don’t have any direct formatting in place yet.

attaching short doc for analysis; meanwhile, I’ll try a Special Paste of the text into a clean odt doc.

Discours - LO sample.docx (8.8 KB)

[ajlittoz]

Your document is still plagued with .docx structural idiosyncracies and I can’t change anything through methodical styling. However, if I copy-paste as unformatted in a new ODF document, everything returns to “normal”.

So start with a clean text without any formatting. Your DOCX is damaged beyond repair (at least under Writer).

[chrishamill]

A clean start is working well! Thank you for the pointers that have removed several hurdles.