So, after using LibreOffice since it came out of beta, decades now, something is messed up in Writer. And I can't figure it out, never saw it before in my life!

English
#1

So, as I said in the title of this topic, I am seeing behavior where something is messed up, that I have never seen in all of the past decades of using LibreOffice — in my entire life! So, here’s what’s going down.

I’m writing in the document, and everything is just smooth as butter right? Just sweet as honey right? I’m old school, so I put a tab in at the beginning of every paragraph, whether I put paragraphs in with no line between them (again, old school) or with a line between each paragraph. Ya dig me so far?

OK. So. All of my paragraphs are getting their tab put in at the first tab stop in Default Paragraph Style or Body Text — usually I never change it from Default Paragraph style. Y’all still digging me here?

OK. So then sometimes, I break up the text with a horizontal line, you know when the flow of the text changes. You know, like say you’re going to a new scene or a change of subject or whatever. We still groovy so far here?

OK. So, when I put the horizontal line in, then after that, it started messing up my tab at the beginning of every line after that. Took me weeks to figure out that was what was going on though, right? Cause of course, horizontal lines don’t (normally) have tabs in them, nor text neither, right? You wouldn’t believe how much text I had to retype and how many documents I deleted because I couldn’t figure out “What in the blue blazes is going on here???!!!” So, here’s what I figured out so far ;

I finally noticed up on the top ruler where the tab stops are, “Hey now, that’s odd as a politician with his hands in his OWN pockets!!!” The symbol for the tab stops on the ruler is like a tiny little upside down T. So you got all kinds of tiny little upside-down T’s up there on that ruler, evenly spaced. But for some reason, all the sudden these 2 symbols that look like tiny capital L characters were getting thrown onto the ruler, between the first tab stop and left margin. And the line/paragraph was only getting about half the width of indent when you hit the tab key than it was getting before this started happening. Don’t know what the tiny upside down T character for the tab stops on the ruler is called, or the tiny L’s.

SO. After days of messing around, I figured out. Well, if you reach up there with the cursor and grab those pesky little L’s on the ruler, and drag them over onto the first tiny upside down T for the first tab stop, what do ya know, it “automagically” takes that tab indent and stretches that bad boy right on back out there to the first tab stop and your tab indent is right back there where you need it to be on your line/paragraph start! But you got to grab both of them, and drag them both back over to the first tab stop, or it still gives you those scrunched up half-width tab indents.

SO. Then I have to start dragging those “little L’s” back over to the first tab stop every time whatever is causing it is doing it. And it’s driving me absolutely crazy “what’s causing this???!!!” Just pops off randomly every so often. Until I drop a horizontal line into the document one day, and out of the corner of my eye I see it!!! There those little L’s are, got dropped right in there! And you don’t get your full tab key indent back until you drag those symbols, the little L’s, back over there to the first tab stop on the ruler. You can keep adding paragraphs with tab indents until “the heat death of the Universe” and your tab indents are scrunched up to half their width!

SO. I’m hoping someone knows what those little L’s are and what’s causing them to just suddenly appear after a Horizontal Line is dropped into the document. Because I thought it had to be something to do with the ‘Horizontal Line Style’, right? But I have gone in there and messed with absolutely every setting I can mess with on that Horizontal Line Style, and it won’t stop doing it.

Far as I know, the Horizontal Line Style is set to be “Next Style” back to Default Paragraph Style, and set to “Inherit From” Default Paragraph Style right by default. And, it seems kind of odd that if it is a setting in the Horizontal Line Style, as soon as you hit enter for a new line after you dropped the horizontal line in there, it does immediately pop back to Default Paragraph Style — so it stands to reason, those 2 little L’s should disappear off of the ruler and your tab key indent behavior in the document should go back to normal according to the Default Paragraph Style settings. Right?

Or am I wrong? Is it something I’m just missing in the Horizontal Line Style? Or is it another setting somewhere else in LO Writer that needs to be changed? Or, is it a bug? I’m really stumped here, I know very little about styles and working with them, or any of the other settings in Writer that might be messed up and causing this.

Thanks for any help/wisdom anyone can give on this problem and help me figure out what is going wrong. Because it’s kinda driving me a bit crazy!

#2

→ Ask/Guide - How to use the Ask site - The Document Foundation Wiki

#4

If you open the Sidebar, select the Styles icon and right-click Horizontal Line paragraph style, you can click Edit style. The Horizontal Line paragraph style dialogue will open, select the General tab and you can see that the next style is Body Text.
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Body Text paragraph style is the paragraph style intended for the main body of your document; it follows all the Heading n paragraph styles as well. Because it is so present, it has its own shortcut, Ctrl+0.

At the moment, and up till now, you have been fighting Writer, always trying to use Default Paragraph Style which is not actually intended to be used in the document at all, it is there to make global changes.
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As you want to use an indented paragraph, why not change Body Text style to have the indent? Right click Body Text style in the Sidebar, select Edit style > Indent & Spacing and set First Line to 1.27 cm (1/2"). OK
.

The Writer Guide has more detail, download from English documentation | LibreOffice Documentation - LibreOffice User Guides

1 Like
#6

Thanks EarnestAl, I appreciate the reply and your solution, I will try this, using the Body Text Style more. I don’t know that I even need to make any changes to the Body Text style, the defaults will probably work well for me. But I will look at the settings and see if I need to change anything. I will read the documentation you linked to, and try to learn more about it. Appreciate your help! :smiley:

#3

I think I may have stumbled on the problem. I edited the Horizontal Line Style, on the tabs ‘tab’ and reset to parent. That got rid of the 2 little " L’s " on the horizontal line itself.

But, it was still exhibiting this behavior right after you hit enter after the horizontal line. I saw that it had indeed switched back to Default Paragraph Style, but the 2 little " L’s " were still in the top ruler where the tab stops are.

So, before hitting enter or doing anything else, I clicked on the menu Styles > Edit Style (hotkey Alt+P) and on the tabs ‘tab’ I clicked on “Reset to Parent Style”. And the 2 little " L " characters disappeared from the top ruler where the tab stops were.

After that, when I repeatedly put in horizontal lines, the 2 little " L " characters on the ruler stopped popping up in there. I don’t know for sure that this is the right solution, but it seems to have fixed the problem. So far.

#5

BTW Please use the Comment icon to make a comment and keep Suggest a Solution to Solutions

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#7

Will do. And I may not have been clear on what I do on paragraphs. I don’t indent my paragraphs, when I start a new paragraph I just hit the TAB key to get a tab or indent of the first line. Thanks.

#8

The horizontal ruler reports the state of indents and tab stops for the current paragraph.

The triangular cursors there are the positions of the indents: left and first line at left, right at right.

Under the ruler, you have the tab stop positions. The bold L-shaped indicators are left-aligned positions; bold mirrored-L-shaped for right-aligned, bold inverted-T-shaped for centre- aligned (bold dotted-inverted-T is a variant for decimal point alignment). Narrow inverted-T-shapes show the position of implicit evenly-spaced stops. The latter are present after the explicitly positioned stops (the bold ones). This explains why your indention created a huge white space because explicit stops always have precedence over implicit ones.

As a general rule, you should never use tabs (at least for indention) or spaces to align your text, particularly if you rely on implicit behaviour. Tab and Space keys don’t provide stable and predictable layout because the justification engine can adapt the width of spaces to accommodate other constraints.

First Line Indent is a built-in style, derived from Body Text which is designed for paragraphs requiring indent on first line. If you find that the indent does not fit your taste, edit the style Indents & Spacing tab.

For any problems involving a change of behaviour in LO, mention OS name, exact LO version and save format because there are subtle differences between platforms and document format plays a major role in formatting glitches.

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