For example consider that I have some line of text that reads:
To Jen
If the cursor was in front of “T” I would expect a 1 (or 0 depending on how they index), in front of “o” a 2, in front of the space (directly after the “o”) a 3, directly after the space (before “J”) a 4, etc…
I believe in MS Word it says it on the bottom of the doc screen, but I can’t seem to find it in Writer.
Thanks!
In my opinion, this functionality makes sense with a text editor where what you type is the definitive layout (think of writing a program in a computer language). Very often, a text editor displays the file in a fixed-width font (because data in the file has no rendering attributes, the file contains only your text).
In a document processor such as LO, character coordinate (line and “column” number) is far less relevant because text composition will change this coordinate very frequently. Moreover, spaces are subject to “inflation/deflation” to account for justification. Words can be pushed from one line to another. “Utility” “ghost” characters may be added by various functionalities (such as hyphens when automatic hyphenation is enabled, title numbers, bullets, …).
The only case where I can see some use for your request is when you write some fixed layout text in a paragraph set in a non-proportional font, left justified. But even here, paragraph area width may play some tricks on your back sending words on the next line.
If your concern is to discover how many spaces you really typed, you can select menu Display->Non-printing characters to reveal spaces, tabs, newlines, paragraph ends, …
And this can be mated with Display->Field Names if you have special automatically-updated insertions.
For a better answer, what is your purpose?