Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 25140
Implement 90 deg text rotation in table cells (multi-paragraph, "LTR (vertical)")
Last modified: 2013-08-07 14:38:26 UTC
In OpenOffice.org Writer, and perhaps in every text-field, vertical text has some handling errors. My Dad is an instructor at a college, and I've been slowly switching him over to OOo from MSO. I tried opening his roster file in OOo Writer, but it looked terrible, upon further investigation (since I know the OOo <-> MSWord filters aren't that bad) I found this broken feature: 1) Open a New Writer Document 2) Write "foo" press enter, "bar" press enter, "baz" press enter 3) highlight "foo^Mbar" and right-click on the selection 4) Choose "Character..." and click on the "Position" tab 5) Under "Rotation/Scaling" check the "90 degrees" radio button and click "OK" You will notice you now have what I would call a "mess". "barFoo" is now on a single vertical line, unfortunately the linebreak is not really rotated, and so both words appear on the same line. There is no way after an hour or so of tinkering, that I've found to remedy this. Hitting "enter" between the two words only adds what -should- be "spaces" between them, and even that seems to be handled wrong. Ideally, when I rotated those two lines, they should have become two separate vertical lines (due to the line break) and subsequent line-breaks should space them apart along the horizontal scale, and not the vertical one. Resulting in the ability to create correctly formatted vertical columns. One application of this would be, in my example, a class roster, with a table with a number of double-digit-length cells, and a vertical column above with a two-line (vertical) description of the cells below. I'm not sure if this makes sense, it isn't just a Microsoft Office import filter problem, it's a problem in the basic way OpenOffice.org handles vertical text. If I can get ahold of it, I can link to his roster (a blank copy at least) MS Word document in explanation of what it looks like, should my above example prove insufficient. Thanks for taking the time to evaluate this bug report, and thanks for all of your hard work on making OpenOffice.org the best Offie Suite out here.
FME->praeluceo: Sorry, the current behaviour is correct. I'll explain it: You are using the character attribute 'rotation', which is intendet to rotate some characters by 90 or 270 degrees to the writing direction. This does not change the layout direction. In your example, 'barFoo' is not in a single vertical line, 'Foo' is some rotated text at the beginning of the first horizontal line, 'bar' is some rotated text at the beginning of the second horizontal line. (If you enable the 'show non-printing characters', you will see that they are located in different lines.) The linebreak does not have do be rotated, because it's a linebreak between two horizontal lines. So, what can you do now? You want a 90 degrees rotated layout. In Writer, we support a 270 degree rotated layout (for Asian text) for pages and frames, if you enable the Asian support in Tools - Options. A workaround to achieve a 90 degree rotated layout in Writer could be one of these: 1) Insert a draw text box (left toolbar, the draw functions button, text, the resulting box can be rotated by any angle) or 2) Set character rotation to 90 degrees, type foo, press shift + enter (manual line break), type bar, press shift + enter and so on. I hope this helps.
I tried the shift+break in an empty text document after rotating the text 90 degrees. This looks like the effect my Dad was going for, and I'm sure that OOo handles the text correctly, is there any way to change the import filters to make this adjustment, or to do something to make MS vertical text look appropriate in OOo? I haven't tried it yet, but I get the feeling that if you had 4 sentences vertically aligned in MS Word, that upon importing that document into OpenOffice.org Writer, you would have one long vertical string 4 sentences tall. If this isn't a problem with OpenOffice.org's handling of vertical text (which it seems like from your reply), is there a problem with its Microsoft Word import filter of the same?
FME: I'm currently implementing vertical layout support (Asian layout, 270°) for Writer table cells (issue 25067). We do not plan to implement 90° layout rotation for OOo 2.0. So what could be done in the filter for 90° rotated layout? The import filter could use our charater rotation attribute if it finds a Word table cell with a 90° rotated layout. This works fine if you have only one line of text in the table cell. But as you already noticed, if there are more than one line in this table cell, applying our character rotation attribute results in one long rotated line in Writer. I'll have to think about this.
FME->BH: Asian layout (270° rotation) for individual table cells will be implemented for issue 25067. 90° rotation will be handled by the import filter by applying the 90° rotation character attribute. So we should regard this issue as a request for 'real' support of 90° rotated layout.
SBA: When doing so, we should ease the way to set the text orientation within Writer table cells too. A screenshot of the MS Word XP text orientation dialog is in the spec for i25067. Only a preview of this kind enables the user to effectively set different text orientation. (Setting issue 28909 as duplicate)
*** Issue 28909 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
FME: Changed title from "Vertical Text Does not format Correctly" to "Implement 90 deg text rotation in table cells"
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*** Issue 35246 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Is this issue about missing "Left-to-Right (vertical)" setting in "Text direction" option from "Text Flow" tab of "Table"->"Table properties" dialog ? Now there are only "Left-to-Right" and "Right-to-Left (vertical)" options and "Right-to-Left (vertical)" works fine, but text is rotated by 270%, when most people in Europe needs 90%. I think "ms_interoperability" keyword should be added to this issue, there are problems when vertical text in MS Word Document contains more than one paragraph. Also there are strange problems, when vertical text fits on more than one line, when vertical text doesn't have paragraph break in the middle, but when (because of row height) it doesn't fit in one line, look at last tree attachments (submitted by cowmixtoo) from bug #16944 Note, this is not the same bug like when vertical text contains more than one paragraph. I'm attaching simple OpenDocument Text document with table to this bug and posting the instructions how to reproduce problems, which appear after document is saved and reopened (document looks differently before closing and after reopening). So, please open the attached document and: 1. Select all single line vertical text "Mantas eina" from the first cell of table. 2. Choose "Format"->"Character"->"Position"->"Rotation/scaling"->"0 degrees" and text becomes horizontal, but in two lines (because of the column width) - "Mantas" in the first line and "eina" in the second. 3. Select whole first row and choose "Table"->"Autofit"->"Row Height.." and type 1.8cm 4. Select again all text "Mantas eina" from the first cell of table. 5. Choose "Format"->"Character"->"Position"->"Rotation/scaling"->"90 degrees" and text becomes vertical and in two lines (because of the row height) - "Mantas" in the first line and "eina" in the second. Such multiline vertical text is often used in header of tables and it seems OpenOffice.org 2.0 works fine (I'm attaching screenshot of this, named "multiline_vertical_text_in_table-OpenOffice.org-2.0-Writer.png") if not one strange problem, which occurs when "Optimal Row Height" is set: 6. Select whole first row and choose "Table"->"Autofit"->"Optimal Row Height" - after this vertical text remains in two lines, like previously - look at attached screenshot, named "multiline_vertical_text_in_table-OpenOffice.org-2.0-Writer.png" 7. Save the document and close it. 8. Reopen the document and you see vertical text "Mantas eina" in one single line, not in two lines, like before closing - I'm attaching screenshot of this, named "bug_with_vertical_text_in_table_after_reopening-OpenOffice.org-2.0-Writer.png" Should I post these instruction as separate bugreport ? If so, what should I type in the Summary field ? Btw, when I save this table with vertical text in "MS Word 97/2000/XP" format I get horizontal text after reopening .doc file, should I file another bugreport about this ?
Created attachment 30334 [details] Saved multiline vertical text in table with OOo 2.0 Writer (shows text in single line when open it with OOo 2.0)
Created attachment 30337 [details] Table with multiline vertical text in OpenOffice.org 2.0 Writer
Created attachment 30338 [details] Screenshot of OpenOffice.org 2.0Writer after reopening saved multiline vertical text in table
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setting keywords, extending summary
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Is anything going to happen with this bug? First reported in 2004, now, middle of 2006 and *many* duplicates have been tagged - is there any reason this has not made it onto the developers list of things to do?
This is a duplicate of i3692. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 3692 ***
i3692 even dates back to 2002.