There are two colour decoration modes in Writer:
- whole paragraph
- selected words
You can give a whole paragraph some background colour through its Area
tab in its paragraph style (or through Format
>Paragraph
if you’re an adept of direct formatting but this is discouraged in documents undergoing reviews).
The colour will cover entirely the paragraph bounding rectangle without discontinuity.
Highlighting selected words will be limited to the glyph rectangles, thus line spacing in not taken into account, as is expected for a highlighting effect (some background must be shown around the highlighting).
Tabs are not words (or rather they have no glyph in the font; their bounding rectangle do not exist; they are translated as a computed-width spacing), therefore they can’t receive highlighting.
In your case, it looks like you want a paragraph background. If it is more complicated, edit your question to explain what you expect (or describe this in a comment to my answer). You’ll have to play with user paragraph styles.
To show the community your question has been answered, click the ✓ next to the correct answer, and “upvote” by clicking on the ^ arrow of any helpful answers. These are the mechanisms for communicating the quality of the Q&A on this site. Thanks!
In case you need clarification, edit your question (not an answer) or comment the relevant answer.