Leading tabs lost in v6.4.5 vs v6.3.6?

[OldLinux]

I suppose I am an old-school typist when it comes to using LibreOffice Writer. I’ve used it in its various versions for many years and I love the product. I am not sure if I am reporting a bug or just noticing a change, but I want to report something odd I’ve seen when I open my documents written with LOW v6.3.6 in v.6.4.5.

In v6.3.6, I’ve written like this – carriage-return + tab for indentation:

        Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
        Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

When I open these documents in v.6.4.5, they look like this:

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

It looks like the leading tabs I’ve always used are lost when I use the newer version of LOW. I use the ODT file type and I have tested and confirmed this behaviour in the Mac and Linux versions of LOW. Considering how I use the ODT file type, I am a little surprised that the application reads the same document differently across the two versions. Is this something I should expect to see in v7 now that it’s out?

I thank you in advance!

[ajlittoz]

The description of your typing habit is incomplete. You didn’t mention which paragraph style is used for your text.

I assume you are not using the style machinery built in Writer and you instruct manually Writer for all the layout. I also guess from your use of double space after sentence end you live in the US where this formatting is common.

Without custom configuration of the paragraph style (Text Body is intended for the document discourse while Default Style should only be used to define “universal” defaults), your tabulation behaviour rely on implicit stops (or maybe on manual stops created in the horizontal ruler – you didn’t tell).

The even-spaced implicit stops are defined in Tools>Options, LibreOffice Writer>General in the Settings section. By default, there is a stop every 1/2 inch. Maybe you have a difference between 6.3.6 and 6.4.5, all the more if your user profile was recreated when updating.

The reliable way to indent the first line of a paragraph is to customise the used paragraph style in its Indents & Spacing tab. By setting the first line indent, you no longer need to type a tab. Also, changing this parameter will automatically update all paragraphs controlled by this style.

If the behaviour doesn’t result from configuration discrepancy, edit your question to attach a sample file for further analysis. The problem may originate in inconsistent style use.

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In case you need clarification, edit your question (not an answer which is reserved for solutions) or comment the relevant answer.

[WineCurmudgeon]

Please take this man’s complaint seriously. It’s not about whether he knows how to use a word processor, and I checked all of those things to no avail.

It’s about a bug in LibreOffice. I have had this happen twice – on upgrades to 6.2 and 6.45. The paragraph indent key stopped working, and all the paragraph indents in every Writer document on my computer disappeared when I opened the document. Each time, I had to purge that version of LibreOffice from the computer (I’m on Xubuntu 20.04, and was on Xubuntu 18.04 the first time). The first time, I did a force version to get the old version; the second time, I had to delete 6.45 and install 6.46 by hand.

I understand bugs happen. But how does the same bug happen regularly?

[anon73440385]

Please take this site seriously and don’t post an “Answer”, if you actually don’t provide a solution to a question but a comment and if you are convinced that it is a bug (missing any reference to a bug report), then this site is not the right place to address the issue, since people trying to help here, in general are neither developers nor affiliated in any way to TDF, but users of LibreOffice, just like OP and you (Bug reports should go to: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/).

[ajlittoz]

To fix a bug, it is necessary to understand how it happens. The worst bugs are the non-deterministic ones. And I fear this one belongs in this category.

It never happened to me but I’m using exclusively the style machinery and forbid direct-formatting in all my documents. So I suspect it is related to the so-called “intuitive” (very ill-named) way of using Writer. The case is complicated by the fact that it occurs on update. This is a time where, depending on packaging by distro managers, installer scripts may play with the user profile and certainly play with the global configuration.

A direct-formatted document therefore becomes highly vulnerable to little discrepancies between the global conf and the user profile because the document relies only on implicit assumptions/settings instead of being secured by styles.