I am creating a Table of Contents for a 3 ring binder
Version: 7.3.7.2 / LibreOffice Community
My left tab settings are fine, but when I set a right tab with an underline Writer adds a gray background
How do I delete the gray background?
Thanks
Cyndi
You can’t delete it, just hide it (they will be no printed).
Menu View - Formatting Marks, or Ctrl+F10, or pilcrow (¶) button in the Standard toolbar.
Thanks for sharing all needed data in your question.
The solution is given by @LeroyG. I only add an explanation. This gray shading is a non-printing visual clue added by Writer to flag generated “non-editable” characters. By “non-editable”, I mean you can’t erase or add individually these characters. If you press Bksp, you’ll delete the tab and the whole leader will disappear.
I recommend you don’t disable the clue because it helps you to better understand and control your document structure.
EDIT
You should learn how to automatically generate a TOC by styling your headings (chapter titles) with the Heading n family of paragraph styles.
Thank You Leroy G.
My take away from your comments is that the gray shading will not print, I can hide it if it bothers me but that is not really necessary and hides all of the formatting marks.
I will be learning about Styles and auto TOC when I convert a training manual from MSWord to Libre Writer. I have recently converted from Windows to Linux and am learning the differences. This particular TOC is a stand alone document and does not have a connection to any chapters.
Thank you for your complete answer to my question. It is appreciated.
Cyndi
Warning! If you want a really clean structure in your document without slag garbage inherent to the approximate translation from DOC(X) to ODF, it is better for future modifications to paste your old manual as Unformatted Text into a blank file and apply styles to the various paragraphs. Note Word has no notion of character styles and this “decoration” ends up as direct formatting on simple import. This direct formatting is the entrance to formatting hell. So learn first what you can gain with character styles. Similarly, Word has no page style and frequently complex documents are made up of individual pages with their own page styles after translations. Once again this causes terrible difficulties to maintain documents.
This is why I recommend to start from unformatted text even if it looks a lot of word to reformat the document. All in all you’ll spend less time this way.
Thank you for this guidance. I have already had a lot of trouble trying to get Word to do the formatting and TOC the way I want it to so starting with unformatted text and setting the styles up the right way to begin with should seem a lot easier. I will give that a try.
Cyndi
Maybe these manuals will help you to deepen the knowledge. Especially the first chapters.
Writer Guide 7.5
