Style editing UX issues in Writer

[bgc]

I tried to replicate a document I had made with Scribus (https://www.scribus.net/), and, I found the process frustrating to say the least. Whenever I updated a style, or applied a style to a block of text, and it may:

• Insert a unexpected frame around it.
• Get combined with another block preceding it.
• Mess up the margins or spacing for it.

I haven’t tried with Microsoft Word yet, but I’d imagine it would be less bug prone than Writer. I was able to get a good result with HTML and CSS though. Please see the link below: it contains the original Scribus document, the PDF output of the latter, and an HTML version.

Items Shared on 1-9-2026 1

I admit, in Scribus, there was some minor tweaking of the vertical positioning of text boxes, and at times, I used the story editor, but overall, I found the application of styles to be more reliable than Writer. The HTML version was the most satisfying one to edit: web browser layout engines are quite powerful.

When editing and applying styles in Writer, are there things I can do to avoid formatting issues, and ensure consistency?

[fpy]

@bgc

consistency

classical → Frame style still not updating frames correctly

[EarnestAl]

There is nothing in the CV that requires frames, and definitely not text boxes (which are drawing objects). You can insert Sections with two columns in the single column page.

I couldn’t open the Scribus document and the PDF had characters in the U+100000 range, the HTML doesn’t show layout and has different content.

There seemed to be too many different fonts in the pdf document that I started copying from until the second page prevented that so I eventually cleared direct formatting in the final document.

From the default blank page, I changed Heading paragraph style to font FiraSans-SemiBold. I added Small Caps case to the Title paragraph style. I altered List 1 paragraph style to include bullets and to not add spacing between paragraphs of the same style. There were some other style changes as well.
Current-CV-Redacted-FieldsEA.odt (27.3 KB)

Have a look through while checking the styles that I used, there was very little modification from the default styles included in a blank document.

You might care to refer to the Writer Guide, download from English documentation | LibreOffice Documentation - LibreOffice User Guides and to Designing with LibreOffice, link to download at English documentation II | LibreOffice Documentation - LibreOffice User Guides