Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 3852
You can not set tabulators beyond right paragraph margin
Last modified: 2020-02-20 19:03:32 UTC
In MS Word you can set paragraph right margin and tab stops on it's right. OO does not allow this, that creates problems in imports and it's a feature I use very often (I've lots of documents with this). It's a easy way to make a list of products with long description and "expose" the price of the product i.e. (x=right margin, | = tab stop) --------------x-----------| a) f dsj dfj df dflk dkf ej kkd ______ $15 b) dkd kde eidf fjeif idf ldf l ______ $74
Reassigned to Michael.
It is possible to set tab stops beyond the right paragraph indent, but it is not possible to use them there. For a better import quality we should implement this, but for other things it does not really make sense in my opinion. Has to be decided by the product management, wether this should be implemented or not.
It does make a lot of sense to me. It's very useful in a lot of situations (think, for instance, of a restaurant menu, with long descriptions of food and then the price). You can often have the same effect with tables, but they are much more difficult to create, use, format and fill. It's not only a compatibility problem.
Reassigned to Bettina.
Any news about it? Doc import filter has greately improved since 1.0 (I'm testing m71 now), but this issue should be fixed also. In addition, I consider this as a useful feature by itself, it saves you from having to deal with tables and annoying (and difficoult) formatting settins in many circumstances.
To grep the issues easier via "requirements" I put the issues currently lying on my owner to the owner "requirements".
Created attachment 76601 [details] Word sample of tabulator use outside of right margin
I like to bring up this topic once again as I ran into this problem today. This is not a question of better import, but a question of whether one can easily create a needed layout. With all kinds of indexes or tables of contents you always have some kind of text (entry) in a left column followed by a page number after a right justified tab. As implemented today, one cannot place the tab beyond the paragraph's right margin. This automatically results in text floating into the page numbers "column" whenever the text entry is longer than the space left for the left column. In Word one can assign a right margin to the paragraph so that the text entry never flows into the right-most 2cm for instance. Allowing the tab to be placed outside the margin gives a clean layout: text to the left (floating for multiple mines if needed), page numbers to the right. I attach a sample Word document which you can load in both Word and Writer to compare.
One more comment to my message of yesterday: I understand that for purists the right paragraph margin is a fixed border. No part of a paragraph should be located to the right of the right margin, including no tabulator text. However, the placement of a tab beyond the right margin is just a crutch as implemented by Microsoft. The correct solution would be an additional paragraph property defining indents. Currently there is a left margin and a right margin specified. In addition there is an indent specified which defines the left margin for the first line of a paragraph. If this indent is negative, this will result in a "hanging indent", i.e. the first line starting to the left of the paragraph's left margin. What is needed for lists such as a table of contents or an index is another paragraph property specifying the reverse effect of a hanging indent. Where the hanging indent places text (usually numbers, bullets, glossary words) to the left of the first paragraph line, such a "reverse indent" would place text (usually a page number, price or keyword) to the right of the last paragraph line. Thus for a TOC one would define a paragraph having a right margin of e.g. 2cm with the last line having a reverse indent of -2cm - into which one could place a right-justified or decimal tab if needed.
Any decision of this problem must be implemented. The "crutch" described above simplifyes formatting text. OpenOffice and Libreoffice have many features to make a good design for the text but TOC looks like from early 90.
*** Issue 12565 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
This seems to me as solved. OpenOffice 4.1.7 stops on right intent. Marking as Obsolete. Please reopen if anyone disagrees.