Episode: 1365
Title: HPR1365: LibreOffice 14 Writer A Numbered List Style Deconstructed
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1365/hpr1365.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:18:38

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Hello, this is Ahuka. Welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio and our ongoing
series on Libre Office Writer. And I want to pick up from where we left off last time
when we took a part of bullet list and saw the various things that make it tick. Now, you
know, understanding how to handle lists, both in terms of the structure and the appearance
can be a little bit tricky. And that's why we're taking the time to deconstruct these things
because when you understand what all of the pieces are, it really helps. And as I said
before, I had this encounter with the gentleman at Ohio Linux Fast and it had exactly to do with
these list styles. And it was, you know, why can't I get things to line up the way I want and I was
able to say, well, because you're not taking a look at the styles. As I've said over and over again,
you know, if you're just clicking buttons, you know, you're looking at the top of the screen and
you see some buttons up there and you, well, just click this button and get what I want. In the long
run, you're just going to make your life a whole lot more miserable. You really need to do this
with styles. So this time, what we want to do is we want to take a look at a numbered list
style and take a part of the components of that and see how that works. Now, a little note
up front, we're going to be talking about how you can change the settings. If you are working with
one of the built-in styles, you might want to make a copy of it first and experiment with your
copy instead of experimenting with the original. It's up to you. You're all adults out there. But if
you go to the very last icon on row two of the styles and formatting window, that's the one
that says create a new style based on the selection. So click on one of these styles, then go to
that icon and create a new one. Create several, you know, start playing around, see what the difference
is. And that way your original is preserved. In fact, a really good technique is to make a copy of
it and make a modification and put that into the name of the style itself. So, you know, this will
be one with a different numbering scheme. This will be one where I've shifted the alignment
stuff like that. Then you can go through and you can see how each of these things affects
what's going on. You know, if you take a little time to learn this, it's going to make your life a
lot easier. So, we're going to take a numbered list. So, why is that different from a bullet list?
Well, many of the options really are the same. But there are some different ones because numbered
lists have something bullet lists don't have. Bullet lists are just collections of items.
There's no particular order. So, imagine a shopping list. You've got to pick up milk eggs and
bread at the store. You know, it doesn't matter whether milk is number one, number two, or number three
on your list. Here's all the stuff I'm going to get when I go to the store. So, there's no order
there. In a numbered list, order is important. And that's a good way to decide which kind of list
you need to use. If the order doesn't matter, then what you want is a bullet list. If the order
is important, and a good example of that is a set of directions. So, we all know driving directions,
for instance. Imagine that someone gives you directions and says you go three miles east on this
road. Then you turn right, go another two miles, then turn left, go another mile, and stop.
Now, you'll only get where you're going. If you follow these steps in this exact order,
if you mix them up, I don't know where you're going to end up, but it's not going to be the destination
you were looking for. So, let's take, in this case, numbering one as an example. All right? And so,
if you want to just look at what's in numbering one, we can go ahead and do that. You just right
click choose modify, because that's how you get the style configuration window. As I said before,
if you want to experiment, then first create a copy based on this and do your experimenting with
the copy. So, anyway, if you get the style configuration window open, you're going to have a lot
of the same tabs that you had before. Organizer bullets, numbering style, outline, graphics,
position options, very, very similar. Now, the organizer tab, if you're working with a built-in
style, that's all going to be grayed out because the built-in styles, there's nothing you can do
in the organizer tab. There's no configurable options, in other words, for built-in styles. If you
create your own style, you're going to have some options there. The bullets tab, not really going
to do anything for you if you're on a numbered list. And pretty much the same for the graphics tab,
because the graphics tab was just putting in fancy graphics to use for your bullets. So, we take,
we eliminate those from the discussion, and what are we left with? Well, the first place that we're
going to be looking is numbering style. Now, this is a selection of styles that you can apply to
your numbered list. You've got lots, you've got Arabic numerals, Roman numerals, periods and parentheses,
upper and lower case letters, and all sorts of combinations. So, the very first one is Arabic numerals
where the number is followed by a right parentheses. Second one is the same Arabic numerals where the
numbers are followed by a period. Third one, the same Arabic numerals, but now you've got left and
right parentheses around each of the numbers. Fourth one, we're now into Roman numerals followed by a
period. Then, on the second row, we've got capital letters, ab and c, each followed by a right
parentheses. Next, we've got lower case letters, ab, c, all followed by a right parentheses.
And the next one after that is lower case letters with parentheses around the letters.
And then, the last one is lower case Roman numerals, followed by periods. So, you see, you got a
lot of stuff here. Now, these are just the ones that are built in. You can make style changes,
which we can take a look at a little bit later on, but so here's a selection of styles. And these
are the most common ones that you could apply to your numbered list. So, if we were taking a look at
numbering one from the list of built-in styles, that's equivalent to the second selection up top,
which is the Arabic numerals followed by a period. So, if you were experimenting and wanted to go
back to where you were, if you just clicked on that, you would do it. And when you click on one of
these styles, you will see that it has a thick black border that appears around that square.
And that's how you know that it's the one that's selected, and then you can just click apply,
and it will be applied to the style and applied to the element you're working on.
So, that's numbering style. The next tab is outline. Now, outlining is a topic in itself. So,
I'm not really going to get it into it in this. We're actually going to have a whole separate lesson
on outlining. Now, the next tab that I want to look at then is position.
That's works in much the same way as with bullet lists, but let's go over it again. This was where
the fellow at Ohio Linux Fest was getting confused. So, what's happening here?
By design, all lists are meant to be used as a hierarchy when needed, which means that they function
somewhat like an outline in that you have main list items in level one, sublists in level two,
and so on. Now, Libre Office Writer gives you up to 10 levels you can control.
But for now, let's just look at level one, and then we'll see what happens with the others.
If you click on the one in the level field, you will see the built-in settings for the level one
of this style. The first setting is numbering followed by, and it is set to tab stop.
And that means there is a tab setting for where the actual text will start on each list item.
The other options are space and nothing. If you select space, you get a single blank space between
the numbering and the text. So, let's think about what this means. We know we're in numbering one,
and numbering one has the number itself, the Arabic numeral, followed by a period, followed by
what? Well, if it was a tab stop, it would be the number, the numeral, let us say, followed by a
period, and then it would jump to wherever the tab stop setting was. If it's a space, you would have
the numeral, a period, a blank space, and then the text would begin. Now, the other option you have
is nothing, and then you would just have the numeral, a period, and the text immediately. Not sure
when I would want to use that. I think tab really is the best, and clearly so do the Libra
Office developers, since that's the one they chose as the default. This makes sense when you
start thinking, what happens if you have a long list that goes to double digits? If you used either
space or nothing, when you get to the number 10, all of your text would be shifted over because of
the added numeral. And if you had a proportional font, you would see things shifted over by slightly
varying amounts. With tab, everything lines up just right. This matters even more if you use Roman
numerals because the Roman numerals take up, one is i, two is i, i, three is i, i, i, and then four is
i, v, and none of these have the same amount of space in them. If you use Roman numerals, that
tab setting is really important, and you might need to add a little extra space into the tab, okay?
So, the default for the tab stop is on my machine, two tenths of an inch, point two zero inches.
Now, I'm in the United States. We're a backward country that has not yet adopted the metric system.
So, I have everything set in inches. Two tenths of an inch is a little less than a centimeter,
because I think a centimeter is roughly a third of an inch. And I'm just doing rough
comparisons here. Or in other words, it's roughly three centimeters to the inch.
So, anyway, this minus set at two tenths of an inch, but two tenths of an inch, what?
It's calculated from the left margin. Now, in a way, that's good, because it gives you
a standard that doesn't change. You know, imagine you had a tab that went from wherever you
finished the number. It doesn't get you very far. So, by doing it from the left margin,
that means everything lines up exactly, but two tenths of an inch from the left margin,
may mean that the text starts very close to the numbers, particularly if your numbers start to
get larger. That's where my friend at Ohio Linux Fest got in trouble, because he didn't understand
that. And so, if you were using the style, you would simply go into the style and say,
you know, make it three tenths of an inch, make it, you know, one and a half centimeters,
or whatever is going to work for you to create that amount of space, but measured from the left
margin. And if you do that right, you're going to have everything just line up perfectly.
Now, the next thing is numbering alignment. And numbering alignment is also relative to the left
margin, and it works with the aligned at that is just under it. So, my default
says numbering alignment left aligned at zero, 0.00 inches. So, what does that mean?
So, if you click on each level at succession, you can clearly see what it works.
Aligned at is the offset to the margin. At 0.00 inches, it's not offset at all. But if you start
clicking on each of these levels in succession, you see that, well, level two is aligned at
point two inches, which means it will start at two tenths of an inch from the left margin.
Level three is aligned at point three nine inches, level four at point five nine inches,
and so on. So, in other words, each level is indented by around a fifth of an inch compared to
the level above it. Now, if your list not have a lot of levels, you could increase these offsets
if you wanted to, and that would put a little more white space into what you're doing.
Again, if you are in a civilized country, this will be in centimeters instead of inches.
Alignment determines where the left margin is relative to the numbering. As we saw with bullets,
this could be counterintuitive a little bit, because we're used to left and right align in other
places, and it means something different. If it is left aligned, that means the left margin
is on the left of the numbering. So, if you've got a number one, you say just to the left of that
number one will be the left margin of the page. So, that's a left aligned. Now, if you had selected
center, what that would mean is that the left margin would run right through the center of your number.
Somewhat different kind of thing. And if you had chosen right, and this is the really counterintuitive
part, because if you choose right alignment, it shifts everything over to the left, and this
confuses people. But what that really means is, if you take a look at your number, the left
margin will be just to the right of the number. Take a look at some of those. You'll start to get
the idea. So, with right aligns, the left margin comes after your number, unless there is an offset.
But in other words, the offset is from wherever the alignment has set it.
Now, the last of the position settings is for indent. Where do you indent?
And what this refers to is what happens. If your list item is more than one line long.
So, imagine that you're typing along, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it jumps to the next
line, because you've ran out of space on line one. Where does line two start? I've always thought
you want line two to start exactly the same place the text of line one started.
And you will get that every time, if you're indent and your tab stop are the same, because again,
this is measured from the left margin. So, if your tab stop was two tenths of an inch, make your
indent two tenths of an inch. Then everything lines up absolutely perfectly.
So, maybe there's some situation where you don't want that to happen. I have trouble imagining
a situation where that really looks terribly good if the first line and the subsequent lines
don't match up. I mean, there can be situations. There are things like hanging paragraphs and things
like that where people do interesting things, but my feeling is with most list items, you really
want those to line up. So, that is the deconstruction of a numbered list, and I think we've accomplished
a few good things here today. I just got some very exciting news. There is a fellow named Bruce
Byfield, and I don't know if I've specifically mentioned him here before. I may well have because
he's one of the gurus in this area, and someone I follow very closely, and he just signed a contract
to do a book on Libra Office, and it's not just any old book, it's called Libra Office
Styles and Templates. You can tell from a title like that that this is going to be great.
Bruce is basically going to be writing this book from exactly the same standpoint that I've
been doing this series, which is that you use Styles and Templates to control what you're doing,
and that's how you really get all the power out of this. I don't know how long it's going to take
him to write the book, so maybe we're six or eight months away from anything appearing, but
it's something to keep an eye on, and when I have more news, you know I will definitely pass it
along to the community here at Hacker Public Radio, because I know from people who have talked to me
that there are a lot of people who really enjoy this Libra Office series and want to get more
of this good information. So that's just something to look forward to. Bruce is one of the gurus I
learned from, so I think it's going to be a great book. So with that I'm going to sign off,
and as always I'm going to say please, please, please support free software. Thank you, goodbye.
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