Justify alignment disarray in RTL

English
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#1

Hi, I have a long running issue with Writer (using the latest 7.5.0.3), where when I put a paragraph, in justified mode, it breaks down looking like this:

image

While it should look like this (you need to add/remove a couple of tabs/enters/spaces to rectify this):

Image

new users can't put more than one embedded....

So although, this could be rectified by add-removing several characters as mentioned above, but as soon as you save, or keep editing other parts of the document, the anomaly returns.

So I’d appreciate any suggestions that might resolve this.

#2

Hey everyone, just updated to 7.6.0 and even though there’s mention of better handling of RTL, justified paragraphs still get misaligned.

  • Many improvements to font handling, especially for right-to-left scripts, CJK and other Asian alphabets.

This is how it looks, I highlighted some of the gaps that appear:

Image

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image711Ă—212 65.9 KB

This is how it should look properly:

Image

image

#3

It is impossible to diagnose anything with screenshots because we have no access to what you really entered. In addition you didn’t even enabled View>Formatting Marks. Your best move is to attach a sample file corresponding to the screenshots so that we can compare with them.

PS: never use a designation like “the latest” because release numbers have their own paces on different platform and what is latest here is not necessarily latest there. And what seems latest for you may not be latest in the distribution.

Also, mention OS name and save format.

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#5

I had a look at your files. They effectively open with many non-correctly justified lines. But Tools>Update>Update All just once fixes the problem.

I take the opportunity to mention that your document is direct formatted instead of using styles. It looks like some professional work (I can’t read Arabic and didn’t submit the document to computer translation) because you are using footnotes and Greek words, likely to illustrate scientific notion naming. This gives a moderately complex document. Consequently, you should definitely go for styling.

It also not clear which of your .docx or .odt document is the primary one. If you intend to work with LibreOffice, you should create only a .odt. Working with native application format is a platinum rule under any application. Saving .docx with Writer will progressively lead you to document corruption. In addition, not all ODF concepts can be translated into DOCX, e.g. character and page styles.This means representation of your document will diverge in the end due to the multiple translations when you open and save it. Just export to .docx only when your document is finalised for your recipients really unable to handle .odt (reminder: Word claims to be able to understand ODF) and never work or update the .docx which should be considered as an intermediate product in the creation process…

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#6

Hello again @ajlittoz, thanks for your illustrations.

What you suggested works as a quick workaround but having to do this, every time you open up a document is quite cumbersome.

Is there any chance that it could be fixed once and forever? maybe it’s a known issue or maybe it can be further tracked by issuing it as a bug?

I almost always use, Body Text (previously Text Body) but the results are the same even if you apply it on the whole document, it wills happen once you close and reopen the document.

Thanks for noting and all the extra details. .odt is what I use regularly, I sent the .docx file just in case, to show that there isn’t anything format-specific about the issue.

#7

I looked again at your .odt file and I enabled Tools>Options, Language Settings>Languages, Complex Text Layout for Arabic. I had not done this this morning when first opening your file. This time, the text reflows and rearranges itself without the need to trigger an update.

Is this setting enabled on your side? It is needed to activate specific script handling.

#8

… which is a bug IMO. The checkbox must not change the program behavior, only some UI elements…

#10

Update: Unfortunately even with the CTL option enabled, the issue happens still, I have many incorrectly justified paragraphs, sending the file right now.

#11

My problem is the reverse of yours. For the current document only has no effect here, perhaps specific to Linux but I don’t care.

Regarding the fact you have to set it for each file is a conservative measure: this setting is kept in the document and won’t change unless you explicitly request it in existing documents. Imagine you have written Chinese stuff. Would you like it to be turned to Devanagari without your consent?

This seems to be the default, but once you have set it to something else, it shows up to the latest used value.

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#12

That’s understandable, but given that this is the baseline function of LO, the result is that Justify simply won’t work for a majority of languages from the get-go (Hebrew, Arabic and Persian).

Furthermore you can change it every time you want to use a new language most users probably use 2 or 3 languages tops.

#13

@ajlittoz @mikekaganski it looks like the issue along with several other RTL issues has already been filed as a bug:

  • Bug 150286 - Wrong justification of Persian/Arabic text

  • Bug 146713 - RTL language overlap problem when mixed with LTR language

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