I’m applying a style to a series of paras. Everything is fine except for the first para. It is leaping across the page with its own left margin set in the middle of the page. It happens to be a list so I tried both a para style and a list style but I’m getting the same behavior. The first para has some features of the style but won’t keep the same margin.
Please can anybody suggest why this is happening and how to fix it?
I’ll be so grateful.
You have applied direct formatting to it possibly. Select it and click Format > Remove direct formatting (Ctrl+M).
Direct formatting overrides character styles
Character styles override paragraph styles
Paragraph styles can override default settings
Check if it has a different paragraph style. You can set the style for the following paragraph in the General tabs of the Style edit dialogue of the current paragraph so you might need to check the style of the preceding paragraph too.
Thanks, EarnestAI, but it’s not any of those. (And I had no style with a left margin in the middle of the page.) What I found was that when I clicked the button in the ribbon for lists, the settings there were over-riding my style. I had to adjust those and now everything seems much more under control. (It was really wild here for a while.) And it seems to me that, even when I created a list style rather than a para style, those settings still over-rode my style. As a long time Word user, this was unexpected. I’m open to being educated further, but I’d argue that the style should, well, define all formatting? It seems reasonable.
Anyway, now my questions are, What else do I need to know about when my styles won’t behave as I would like? And what do you call those settings in the ribbon and where do I define them/how do I find them when I don’t display all those buttons? (It’s quite an accident that I found that because I usually don’t display all those buttons. I hate clutter and love menus/keyboards.)
And really, seriously, I thank you.
Styles are consistent provided you save .odt, not any other alien format, like .docx, which require conversion, usually losing many ODF primitives such as paragraph and list styles.
Style categories (paragraph, character, page, frame and list) target different parts of the whole picture. And these parts are not always “orthogonal”. For example, there is an implicit definition of a character style inside a paragraph style (a courtesy feature to avoid to systematically create a companion character style) but this implicit one is not a totally complete character style.
The picture is also complicated by the interaction between style categories. A list style, when applied or associated with a paragraph style, takes ownership of the left edge of the paragraph (right edge in RTL scripts such as Arabic). It overrides settings for left indent and first line indent. And it is highly recommended not to try to “fix” these parameters in the paragraph style once you have a list style. You’ll end up with an unmanageable mess.
This is word-induced routine. It results in direct formatting, not in styling. To make things worse, since there is no style associated with the list button(s), there is no objective way to determine the extent of the (abstract) list. Therefore heuristics are used to try and guess. Sometimes, due to edit order, this heuristics is wrong and numbering goes awry. More fix attempts ends in worse situation.
The only reliable approach is list styles (which don’t exist in Word). Unfortunately, list style understanding is the second most difficult feature in Writer (after frame styles).
The list buttons are direct formatting so you need to turn off the lists there and then apply a list style.
For a more sophisticated, more manageable approach, you could add a list style to a paragraph style. This allows you start and stop a list by applying a different paragraph style. You still need to restart numbering if you start another list in the same document.
Apply the list paragraph style to the paragraphs that you want as a list. At the end of your list you can press Enter then Ctrl+0 to apply Body Text paragraph style to the new paragraph.
Here is a sample, I have used List 1 paragraph style and added Numbering 123 list style. In Paragraph Style:List 1 > Indent & Spacing I also ticked the box Do not add space between paragraphs of the same style.
SampleListParagraphStyleList1.odt (28.7 KB)
ajlittoz,
This was not any alien file format. It was ODT all the way.
I get that a list style will over-ride a para margin setting. I don’t get that I can create a para style with a numbering scheme–including positioning–and it gets over-ridden. And then literally, I apply the same style to two different paras but they have different margins.
Anyway, no point in debating. It is what it is.
Now that’s useful. Where/how do I alter them in case I’d like to set up my own default.
And I will study your document, EarnestAI.
Thanks.
For List styles, open Styles in the Sidebar and select the fifth icon from the left with tooltip List Styles. Let’s say that you want to create a modified version of Numbering 123 list style. Right click it and select New
In General tab, give it a suitable name.
If you want outline numbering then in the Outline tab choose the nearest to your desired style. Then click on the Customise tab to choose the actual numbering you want for each level including any characters before or after the numbers.
Do take careful note of
You can apply keyboard shortcuts or toolbar shortcuts for your styles from Tools > Customise
There is more in the Writer Guide, download from English documentation | LibreOffice Documentation - LibreOffice User Guides
As you are keen to use styles, the book Designing with LibreOffice might be helpful, download link from English documentation II | LibreOffice Documentation - LibreOffice User Guides
Thanks again. But I had to just shut off any auto numbering and put the numbers in manually. I’m under the gun and I could just foresee the last mile of this project becoming a nightmare. Happily this is a short list and I’m the only author, so it won’t change a lot. The auto numbering was not so critical that it was worth the risk.
But that said, I will try to absorb all this and get better at it. I absolutely have been involved with documents where such automation is a huge benefit.