Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 60781
After cursor movement left or right, format of new typed character should consider direction of cursor movement
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:38:36 UTC
When you use the arrow keys to move to a position between two characters, the format of the next character typed is always taken to be the same as the character to the left of the insertion point. It would be really nice if Writer would take into consideration the direction of cursor movement. If the user was moving the cursor to the left, the format would be taken from the character to the right of the new position of the cursor. If the user was moving the cursor to the right, the format would be taken from the character to the left of the new position. In other words, always take the format from the character you just lept over. (Don't mishandle the case where what you just lept over was not a character but rather an image, table, etc.) I considered listing this as just an enhancement, but the current behavior makes writing certain kinds of documents (such as ones containing many mathematical symbols, superscripts, emphasis, etc.) incredibly laborious. Although the workaround is simple enough, the workaround has to be employed so frequently that I feel it deserves serious attention. People do mostly typing in a word processor, and this is a typing-related issue. Making this feature enhancement would improve user-friendliness by leaps and bounds. To illustrate my point, consider this piece of text: aL|a Here, | represents the cursor, and L is in a different format from either of the a's. I would like to insert a space between L and the second a. Manually changing the format before typing isn't always a reasonable option, because the format may be very complex (e.g., the font, bold, italics, and superscript were all set manually), requiring unreasonable effort. What I end up doing is moving to the right of a, inserting a space and another a, and then deleting the a to the left of the space. While that sounds simple enough, you should try doing it over and over again. Not only does it require unnecessary extra steps, but it's incredibly distracting from the task at hand, which is the composition of a document. The user interface should never get in the way of what the user wants to do.
Reassigned to SBA.
Dont know if this will be validated, but is not a defect. Enhancement. Hwoarang
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*** Issue 113661 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***