Intended use of List Contents/Heading/Indent styles, how to?

[mcsolutions]

Hello, I am new to the community.

I’ve been working on updates to the master styles template for my business documents. One focus of this work is making it easy for me to apply list styles consistently. I read through the Writer’s Guide which provided an excellent description of how to define paragraph styles for lists using List 1, List 2, etc.

However, I noticed three other styles located under the “Text Body” hierarchy that were not mentioned anywhere in the guide:

• “List Contents”
• “List Heading”
• “List Indent”

I can’t find any reference to these styles in any kind of guide, and my search of this site did not surface any discussion of their intended use. I understand that there is no “canonical” way to use pre-defined styles, but I am curious if anyone here has historical knowledge of why these three styles exist and what purpose they might serve that is not equally suited to the styles List 1, List 2, etc.

[EarnestAl]

I found a reference to List Contents and to List Heading in Bruce Bryfield’s book, Designing with LibreOffice linked in the documentation page. They were in a table translating styles into html tags so they might be useful for html.

[mcsolutions]

Thanks for this! I just opened the Styles sidebar and filtered by HTML Styles and indeed, List Contents and List Heading appear. So that seems to be an intended use case.

I also did an experiment by creating a document, adding list header and list content paragraphs, and then exporting to HTML. Weirdly, both the List Contents and List Heading paragraphs exported to <p> paragraph tags, which isn’t what I’d expect.

[EarnestAl]

The book Designing with LibreOffice has this table

Paragraph style	HTML tags	Comments
Heading 1-6	<h1> - <h6>	Notice that only 6 headings are available, while Writer has 10.
List Contents	<p>	Converts to the default paragraph tag. Use with list styles.
List Headings	<dl>, <dd>	Creates a definition list <dl> or adds the heading <dd>.

It does create the tags that the table says it does.

<p>Some text</p>
<dl><dd>
	<dt>My List</dt><dd>
	Orange</dd><dd>
	Banana</dd><dd>
	Apple</dd></dd></dl>
<p>

[mcsolutions]

You are correct, it appears the methods of my experiment were incorrect. I used File → Export and selected the XHTML extension type, which generated an HTML document with raw paragraph tags.

If I do any of the following:

• File → Preview in Web Browser
• File → Send → HTML Document
• View → HTML Source

Then I can clearly see that each List Heading line becomes a <dt> description term tag, and each List Contents line becomes a <dd> description details tag. And any set of lines containing both gets wrapped in a <dl> description list tag.

Here is a snippet of the HTML source I got from creating a List Heading line followed by three List Contents lines:

<dl><dt>List Heading 1</dt><dd>
	List Contents a</dd><dd>
	List Contents b</dd><dd>
	List Contents c</dd></dl>

Thank you for your help!