Page Margins toolbar widget not working

[yarma22]

Hey there,

When using the tabbed toolbar, there seem to be an issue with the Page Margins widget. The displayed value of the margins is 0.00", even though they are actually set to 0.79" (as confirmed by the Page Style dialog). And changing the value of the margins in the widget doesn’t have any impact, nor clicking the +/- buttons.

Note that the buttons to switch between the margin presets (Narrow, Normal, Wide, etc.) are working fine.

Please find below an example of a new document with default settings:

I’ve tried resetting my user profile and the issue still exists. I’ve experienced this issue for a while, so I don’t think it’s specific to the latest version.

Version: 25.2.2.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 520(Build:2)
CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 6.14; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Ubuntu package version: 4:25.2.2-0ubuntu1
Calc: threaded

[ajlittoz]

Layout occurs at different levels.

As you already understood, you configure margins in the page style. Margins define no print areas at top, bottom, left, and right of the page where Writer will not set “spontaneously” any object. It requires strong manipulation to send “objects” in there.

There is a secondary “margin” level associated with each paragraph. These are called spacing above and below paragraph vertically and indent before (left in European-based languages) and after (right again for European-based languages) horizontally. These indents create paragraph-specific additional horizontal “margins”.

Most of the time, margins are enough to compose your document. However, there are circumstances, like quotations, where you want a paragraph to stand out from the surrounding ones. You can do that with non-zero indents.

Indents are graphically controlled by the cursors in the ruler or the boxes in the toolbar you show. Note the small red triangle telling which box controls which indent or spacing. As already mentioned, this is only and additional parameter for a paragraph.

Generally speaking, avoid formatting manually your document. It is much better to do it with a paragraph style. This will also allow you to set the first line indent (which is offered in the UI only with the left top-half cursor in the ruler). The tabbed UIs don’t encourage you to adopt style formatting and this prevents you from discovering all the possibilities offered by Writer.

In conclusion, there is no bug. It is only a partial knowledge on your part. You should read the Writer Guide for an introduction on all existing features.

[yarma22]

Thanks for the feedback @ajlittoz!

However, I’m not talking about paragraph indents. I’m talking about Page Margins. As you can see on the first screenshot, there’s a widget meant to control these margins in the tabbed toolbar. That’s the buggy widget I was mentioning.

[ajlittoz]

I don’t practice tabbed UI because I find them misleading. However I configured my copy for Tabbed Compact and I get a weird behaviour:

• first time I click on Page Margins, correct values are displayed
• subsequent clicks show -0.10cm (instead of yours 0cm, but this is equally faulty)

You indeed discovered a bug. Report it on TDF Bugzilla.

My configuration: LO 25.2.3.2 under Fedora 42 with KDE Plasma desktop.

[yarma22]

Thanks for the confirmation! I submitted the bug report accordingly.