Radius in Writer

[judderod]

Hello, I can’t seem to get the Corner Radius / Radius feature to work. It is always greyed out.

I’ve tried Insert / Shape / Basic Shapes / Rectangle [Or Square].

Then I right click the shape I just created and click Position & Size. Under the Slant & Corner Radius, Radius is blank and cannot be changed.

I’ve found a workaround by creating a Rectangle [Or Square], Rounded. And then adjusting the Control Point 1 X value.

Is there another way to set a radius?

Thanks

[ajlittoz]

You didn’t mention OS name, LO version and save format.

Also, you didn’t tell why you want to insert a rounded rectangle. It is usually a bad idea to insert drawing objects because it disturbs text flow and drawing objects don’t coexist peacefully with text.

It is preferable to design all your drawings in Draw which provides much more convenient tools for this job and then to paste or insert the resulting image into a Writer frame.

That said, playing with the control point is presently the only way to adjust the corner radius. The X value is equal to the radius.

[judderod]

Apologies - W11Prox64, 7.5.0.3, new text document.

It’s for a A4/Letter poster with coloured boxes that contain a heading and text. Basically a few coloured (mostly full width) rounded corner boxes behind 4 or 5 blocks of text on a single page. So I created each Shape, formatted them, then inserted and formatted text boxes into each shape.

Many thanks for your quick advice. I’ve used Writer as I’m more familiar with it but I will have a go with Draw.

[ajlittoz]

@judderod

inserted and formatted text boxes into each shape

Don’t do that. In LO, any shape can contain text. So, label your shape as this is easier than to create a rounded rectangle and a text box you must align with the rectangle. And once again, it is easier to do it with Draw.

@judderod

a few coloured (mostly full width) rounded corner boxes behind 4 or 5 blocks of text on a single page

Using text boxes for that is faulty because you disconnect the text inside from the flow, preventing Writer to layout the text globally. Notably, you can’t style with Heading n to tell Writer what is a heading and what is not.

• Either use a paragraph border
  Only borders around identically styled paragraphs can be merged into a single block. It is easier to achieve with paragraph styles than with direct formatting
• Or create a section for the block and give a background colour
  A section cant have a border but may contain several differently styled paragraphs which will shared the section background

Unfortunately, paragraph border can’t be rounded for the time being but I seem to have read somewhere it is on the way for a future release.

Also, if your document is single page where you have unrelated “areas” for various topics, then Writer is probably not the ideal tool. Writer is flow-oriented where pages are allocated on demand to accommodate text size. Pages make up a sequence where text real estate is managed in a continuous way. To handle the case where you split your page into “areas” with fixed size (no automatic allocation to expand them) you should look at applications like Scribus.

[judderod]

That’s really helpful, thank you.

I did try writing directly in the shape but couldn’t find a way to easily format the spacing between the edge of the rectangle and the edges of the text. New lines didn’t start automatically and just expand the box etc. Adding a text box seemed to do it all easily and automatically. But I will try and recreate the document in Draw as you suggest, hopefully that will do the trick!

Thanks again for your help.