Two new issues:
I’m able to do both in Microsoft Word, so it isn’t a problem with my computer.
Here’s the version I’m using:
Version: 25.8.1.1 (X86_64)
Build ID: 54047653041915e595ad4e45cccea684809c77b5
CPU threads: 8; OS: Windows 11 X86_64 (build 26100); UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: en-US (en_US); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded
Can you enable View - Formatting marks (Ctrl+F10), put the cursor in the offending paragraph, take a screenshot showing the ruler and the paragraph, edit your question and share the screenshot* there?
If you can share a reduced sample document (one paragraph showing the issue), will be better to diagnose the problem. Thanks.
* Something like 
I have a similar problem:
As (I hope) you can see the “A” doesn’t line up with the tab mark. Here is the version information:
25.2.7.2 for Windows 11. I downloaded the latest version (25.8.4.2) in the hope that that might fix it, but no luck.
It seems that the problem was that a gutter was set. Left margin: 1.5 cm, right margin: 1.5 cm, gutter: 1.5 cm. After changing those to left margin: 2.25 cm, right margin: 2.25 cm, gutter: 0 cm, the problem disappeared. This seems to be a bug that needs fixing. NB. The problem might only have occurred on the last page of the document - that’s the only place it was noticed.
Attach a sample file for a more technical look.
Are both first line and before text indent marks aligned at 0 of the horizontal ruler? 
Is the paragraph left aligned?
Where is the after text indent mark? 
Are there more tabs (the blue arrows) to the left or to the right of your paragraph?
There is at least one more tab stop to the right of your paragraph: see that there is no more automatic tab stops to the right of the left tab stop at 4.6 cm.
One possible scenario:
Indent & Spacing and Tabs in menu Format - Paragraph.
Thanks for your input, but my post seems to have been rated as irrelevant, so I suppose it will disappear. There weren’t any extraneous tabs, only the minimum required. There was no indentation, the first line, before text and after text indent marks were in their default/correct positions. Some years ago I created a whole book of over a hundred pages, and many smaller books, using Microsoft Word and a gutter to give a binding margin, and there were no problems with tabs. Things lined up as they should. These problems with LibreOffice do seem to be bugs, and would make it very difficult to produce a book with binding margins.
Where do you see that?
Have you looked at the paragraph style configuration? If you have direct formatting (DF) added over the style, the style dialog does not reflect the combined state (style + DF). The Style Inspector in the right sidepane gives you a global synthesis of all formatting layers active at the cursor position (paragraph, character and DF).
Not necessarily. Is your document DOC(X) (adding conversion problems) or .odt? Formatting principles have differences between both suites. Word has a rather not-so-formal approach where formatting exhibits a pragmatic, manual, contextual manner (most of the features having been added as “instant-response” to problems without prejudice for future evolution) whereas Writer has a more ordered strategy based on well-specified (?) theoretical views on typography.
As a result, Word is rather direct formatting-oriented by lack of synthetic features like omnipresent styles and Writer fosters a consistent “universal” styling strategy.
These difference are important enough to doom to failure any attempt to use one suite as if it was a drop-in replacement for the other. Authors must change their workflow to adapt to underlying principles of the used program.
If your problem is simply a binding margin, this is easily done by modifying the page styles used in your document. Recently, a “compatibility” setting was even added to page style confiration under the name Gutter to mimic Word behaviour. Personally, I find this setting rather clumsy, not covering all cases, and I prefer to change directly margin distances without setting Gutter.
This book is that have problems now or is a new document?
+1
Thanks again. I received an email: " Your post was flagged as off-topic: the community feels it is not a good fit for the topic, as currently defined by the title and the first post. This post was hidden due to flags from the community…"
I was just using the default paragraph style and adding some tabs while editing the text over that. I suppose that’s what you mean by direct formatting. The margins were altered in the (default) page style via the format tab. I have a “Styles” box open on the right. I do not know if that is the Styles Inspector you refer to.
My document is *.odt, originally empty and new. I have been pasting text into it from scanned and ocr-ed pdfs. Some may have been converted into *.docx before pasting without formatting.
I take your point about differences in style. I learned Word by doing. I am trying to do the same with LibreOffice, and generally succeeding, but perhaps I would make life easier by studying the underlying principles.
I have abandoned the binding margin since it is not really necessary for me in this case, and it is unlikely that I shall need one in the future.
Thanks very much for your input. It is a new odt document. I have copied the relevant passage into a new document which still shows the problem, and uploaded it here. It appears that the tabs are not taking account of the gutter and as a result the text is shifted 1.5 cm to the right of the tab stop. Strangely the behaviour is the same whether the page is an even page, with the gutter on the right, or an odd page, with the gutter on the left.
Sample text for LibreOffice forum.odt (16.5 KB)
I looked at your sample file.
The Gutter setting in the page style is the culprit. It offsets everything to the right (and even that is done erratically on different paragraphs) but the UI, notably the ruler, don’t show the correct state. This confirms my reluctance to use it. This setting should not be modified from its 0 default; it is there only to process DOCX documents coming from M$ Word.
This is a bug. An alternating binding margin can be implemented by setting adequately the page style without setting a gutter.
Your sample formatting shows you’re in the preliminary stages of Writer discovery. You are in infancy (no offence intended) and still manipulate it like a mechanical typewriter where everything was done manually.
I suggest you read the Writer Guide for an introduction about how to use the program. This will not describe clearly the underlying principles but chapter on styles will give you an idea. For a deeper dissertation about Styles, the specificity of LO in general (Writer has the more elaborate design of styles among the components of the suite), download and read Bruce Byfield’s Designing with LO available from the same link after clicking on “More” and scrolling down a bit.
Your sample looks like a TOC (table of contents). Writer can produce it automatically, eliminating risk of pagination errors when you style your heading adequately. Format and exact composition of the TOC can be customised in the generator and through built-in style patching.
What is not clearly stated in the documentation above (both books) is the role of Default Paragraph Style (DFS). The wording does not mean this style is the standard one for your discourse. Body Text is the style for that. DFS is here to define your preferences regarding the global look of your text (font face and size, indents, line spacing, alignment, …). Styles are organised in a tree-like structure where styles initially inherit their attributes from their parents (unless an attribute is overridden). Consequently, every change made to DFS propagates to all other styles (unless the attribute is overridden). This feature is very nice to tune or control centrally the loo independent from text or occurrences of formatting in the text.
LOL, thanks.
I seem even more like a baby because of what I am doing. I am not creating a document from scratch. I have a typed document that I produced in 1978, long before PC’s and word processors. I am trying to produce a roughly look-alike document by the most economical method. No fancy formatting is involved, it’s very basic. The scans/ocrs were actually done in 2015 and are not very good, partly because the originals are faded and have marks. I have just got around to dealing with them. I am just copying and pasting into a new odt document. I may abandon this approach since it is unnecessarily time-consuming. (I am not a novice in word processing, I have produced long documents from scratch using various word processors, and I took advantage of automatic indexing and so on as it became available, but even that was a while ago, and things have moved on.)
The simplest approach (I used it for similar reasons) is to paste your discourse as Unformatted Text. Check paragraphs are real “logical” paragraphs (no spurious paragraph breaks in the middle; if any remove them). Eliminate empty paragraphs used to space vertically.
Apply at least built-in paragraph styles: Body Text and various Heading n on your headings.
Customise these styles to begin to have a satisfactory look: at least spacing above and below, perhaps first line indent (and remove an initial Tab if you create the indent this way), font properties.
What you do has global effect as long as you don’t overlay direct formatting.
Enable auto-numbering of headings.
Eliminate your manual TOC et regenerate it with Insert>TOC & Index>TOC, Index or Bibliography. Doing so make you less sensitive to exactly identical pagination as the TOC will adapt itself automatically.
If you have lists, apply built-in list styles (avoid Format>Bullets & Numbering which is direct formatting).
Word “decorations” inside paragraphs are done with character styles. Built-in Emphasis and Strong Emphasis are good starters.
Think of styles as semantic markup. Look is a consequence of significance. Don’t do it the other way round: don’t think in terms of font face, size, weight, angle, colour, … You’ll inevitably apply the same “style” to objects with a different significance and you’ll be unable to format them differently when tuning the style.
At this stage, you’ll probably want to make a distinction the parts making up your book: cover, front material, TOC, chapters, … Each part will be controlled by a different page style with their own margins, numbering, header, footer.
Fields are very useful to insert small variations in page style header or footer, like page number, repeating chapter title … so that a single page style serves a full set of parts (a single page style for all chapters because it covers a single “significance”). Fields also provide cross-references insertion/substitution. Again this will make you immune to little changes in pagination.
Thanks again. These are great tips, though most of them are pretty much what I have been doing. I only need a few paragraph styles. I was disappointed to find that the option to apply direct changes to the style didn’t work as I expected - the way it works in Word - or any of the other word processors I have used. (I started with LocoScript on an Amstrad computer.) I could use fancy styles for headings and so on, but at the moment I am keeping it looking much like the original typed document, though I am not using a constant width type-face at the moment - I might try that though.