Episode: 1305
Title: HPR1305: LibreOffice 08 Writer Tab Styles
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1305/hpr1305.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:15:35

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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
And our continuing series on Libra Office Writer, I'm going to tackle this time tab styles.
That is probably not going to be quite as long as some of the other programs.
We'll see how much time it takes me to get through it.
But the point is that it's a useful topic and we do want to know more about it.
So what are tab styles about?
This is one of those things that originally was a mechanical setting on typewriters, and
it moved the platen, and the platen is the roller that you typed on, a defined distance.
So what use was for paragraph in dense, on the old typewriters, of course we already
handled that with a paragraph style.
Another use was to create columns in the text, and that's much better done, either directly
by creating columns or by using tables.
All stuff that we will probably eventually get to talking about here in this infinitely
long series.
But there are some things tabs can do really well.
That is to create, for instance, nicely aligned dotted lists for things like tables of contents,
invoices, stuff like that.
So generally what you would have with a tab is you would have a descriptor of some kind
on the left, and then a number of some kind on the right, and then a row of dots connecting
them.
Now if you were trying to do that just by typing, what you would run into is the fact that
nothing would ever line up properly, and if you doubt me, give it a try, just open up your
word processor and try to manually do this without using tabs, and you'll see that everything
gets a little bit skewed, and it's just really hard to deal with.
So instead what you do is you create a tab style that's going to handle that.
Now in my personal life I am a contractor, and what that means is I have to build clients
for the work that I do.
And when I create invoices, this is one of the techniques I use in creating the invoice
is to use the tab, so I can build for several different items.
Each one is on its own line, and the amounts I'm building for each will show up on the
right, and my numbers will line up absolutely perfectly and gorgeous.
So how we do that?
I create a style, and I call it tab dot leader full.
Like that means it's using a tab setting, it incorporates a dot leader, and the leader
is the thing that connects the left and the right side.
It doesn't have to be a line of dots, it could be a line of hyphons.
You've got a number of options there, whatever it is that you want to do.
But dots is pretty common, so I do that full, and full means I'm going to take the entire
width of the page to do this.
So my description, the thing that I'm building for, is going to line up on the left margin,
the amount, how much I'm charging them, is going to line up with the right margin.
So how do we do that?
Well, again, you've got your style window open, right?
Because by now you have not convinced yourself that you need to have that styles and formatting
window open all the time and docked on the left-hand side of the screen, I'm going to
climb through the internet and beat you over the head.
So make sure you have that open.
And all you have to do is right-click somewhere in the paragraph style tab and select new.
Because we're going to create a new style, right?
So now on the organizer tab, I give it the name tab dot leader full.
Then I said, for the following, I want to follow it with another one.
That makes sense because when you're doing this, it's usually for a list of items.
I'm talking about invoices.
This would be really great for a table of contents kind of thing.
When you've seen things like this, you know how useful it is.
Now for indents and spacing, I didn't need to make any changes.
For alignment, I left it at left align.
Okay, this things, well, my descriptions are going to line up on the left margin.
And for font, I selected the same font as I used for my paragraphs, which is liberation
Serif 12 point.
You know, you could change any of this if you wanted to have a different font or whatever
you could do that, but this is how I did it.
So so far, it just looks like any other paragraph level style that you're doing.
It's when you come to the tabs tab that the stuff that's specific starts to come in.
And this is where you make it do all of the magical stuff that you want.
So where is the tab going to be?
The tab is for my document at a position of seven inches, okay.
Now how did I come up with seven inches?
It depends on your page layout.
I use the kind of paper in the United States called eight and a half by eleven, which is
the standard page in the United States.
And I have it set up that I have inch and a quarter margins on each side.
And so you add that up, not each, you know, three quarter inch margins on each side.
And when you add it up, that leaves you seven inches of actual text space.
So you know, maybe you need to experiment with this a little bit.
But what I'm saying is go from the left margin all the way over seven inches.
And then at that point, I say I put a little tick mark in the radio button that says right.
So right align this at the seven inch point, which is the right hand margin, okay.
Then for the fill character, I selected a row of dots.
You can have whatever you want.
I mean, you can have none.
I don't like that.
I think the dots is better than none at all.
Or you could have dashes or underscores.
Or you could just select some random character.
I'm not quite sure why you'd want to.
It gives you the option.
Okay.
So the magical stuff all happens on the tab.
So you select the position for the tab.
That's the thing that's going to happen once you press the tab key.
And position right aligned and the fill character.
Those are the three things.
So that's great.
Now, suppose you want to create a list of tabs that does not go all the way across the page.
Okay.
You can do that.
Let's say I want to have one that comes in an inch from the margin on each side.
So how would I do that?
Okay.
Right-click on the style screen, select new.
And I'm calling this tab.liter indented.
That's the name I gave to this style.
So I only need to make two changes to get the effect I want here.
One for each side.
To move it one inch on the left, I go to the indents and spacing tab and set the indent before text to be one inch.
Then to get an equal change on the other side, I go back to the tabs tab.
And here I set the position to five inches.
Okay.
So what that's doing, that position thing is actually measuring from the beginning of the tab entry.
And since I had already moved the tab entry one inch, and I want to move in from the margin one inch, that's a total of two inches.
So I go from the seven inch position down to the five inch position.
And that's going to give me a very nice tab leader that is a dot leader that is going to be indebted in each on either side.
So this may not be something you often need to do, but when you need to do it, you really want to know how.
So if you use this technique to create your tabs, you're always going to look perfect.
It's going to look professional.
And I think that's really what you want to do.
So, you know, this, as I said, is a little shorter than some of my others.
But I think just a useful piece of information that I wanted to make sure I passed along, because I discovered there are a lot of people who just never quite learned this little trick.
So with this, I am signing off.
This is a hookah.
And once again, I want to remind everyone, as I always do, to support free software.
Thanks.
Bye.
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