Hello,
Does anyone know if there’s a specific setting in paragraph font or style info that governs whether the space character is visible when Formatting Marks are shown? We are aware of setting to make them visible in general under Tools → Options → LibreOffice Writer → Formatting Aids, but this seems to break easily with our current use case.
Some background information: We are part of a circle of friends that is creating a fantasy roleplay in a sort of round robin storytelling format, and we’re exchanging one .odt document everyone contributes to to do this. For example, I save the document with a paragraph or two explaining what my character, Beak, does next, then send it to the person who’s playing Taki, who adds their contribution and then sends it to Rena, and so on. With three different people working on this particular document, there isn’t always consistency in the formatting between sections; what is set up as the default font/spacing/etc. on one person’s system may look out of place on another’s. For the most part, I don’t mind this; this isn’t a professional manuscript so much as it’s just some friends having fun, so if everyone’s sections look a little different, whatever.
The problem is that I have Formatting Marks turned on, because the visible dot representing empty space characters is vital for my workflow. If someone else has different formatting on the post right before mine, I can simply change the style back to default for mine… and then, al l the sudden, spaces are no longer visible. This is where I’m stuck; what in the style settings anywhere makes them invisible, and how can we make them visible again?
Please refer to the attached document. I don’t want to subject you all to our fantasy roleplay, so I changed the actual text of each section to “This is a [Character] post. Its information has been removed.” However, I made sure to keep each section in the original style/formatting in which it was presented, changing only the actual text. If you look at this document with Formatting Marks on, you should notice that everything looks normal for the first couple rounds, then Rena writes a post in a different style that has the same font but noticeably increased line spacing. With the Styles menu visible, it appears that every post up to that one was written in the “Default Paragraph Style” style, whereas that one was written in the “Body Text” style.
Fair enough, so I can change it back to Default Paragraph Style for my turn… but that’s where the trouble begins. Note the Beak post at the bottom, just underneath the Rena one. The dotted space characters are gone.
This is where I’m stuck. Every post up to the last Rena one appears to be in “Default Paragraph Style” and have visible spaces, but the final Beak post, where I manually selected “Default Paragraph Style,” has made the spaces invisible. In fact, if this document works the same on your end as it does on ours, then you should be able to replicate this by highlighting any of the previous posts, then double-clicking “Default Paragraph Style” in the Styles pane (even though it’s already highlighted and that should be the style it’s in already anyway?) and the visible space characters will disappear as soon as you do that.
So… something in the style settings is overriding the general formatting codes and forcing the spaces to be invisible, perhaps? But what? And why? And how do we fix it?
Thank you so much for any help you can provide!
Affected Document.odt (29.2 KB)