Episode: 1267
Title: HPR1267: LibreOffice 04 Writer Style Properties 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1267/hpr1267.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 22:41:18

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Hello, this is Ahuka and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio and I am continuing
my series on Libra Office and focusing for a while now on Libra Office Writer.
Now in the last episode, we took a look at an introduction to the idea of styles.
Remember that styles and templates are the two key concepts that you need to master if
you're going to be a proficient user of any word processing program, really.
It's not just Libra Office Writer, Microsoft Word, Open Office, Corel Word, Perfect Office,
you name it.
If you haven't mastered styles and templates to some degree, you're just never going to
really be any good with this stuff.
So we had a default template and then last time we talked about the different kinds of
styles.
There are five kinds of styles, paragraph styles, character styles, frame styles, page styles
and list styles.
Kind of a lot, isn't it?
Well, again, the thing that you want to bear in mind, you do not have to master in detail
all of this stuff, I can tell you, I haven't mastered all of it, there is so much that you
can do with a program like Libra Office Writer or any of the other word processing programs.
You want to consider the fact that the people working on this stuff have been adding features
for the last 20 years, I remember Word Perfect on a DOS computer way, way back and that
seemed to have everything you would ever need.
Well, that was 20 years ago and they keep adding more and more features and there's new
versions, Libra Office 4.0 is bad out, it's coming out, I'm not sure is it out now or
we'll be out soon, I think it might be an alpha.
And you know, they're talking about Microsoft Office 2013, et cetera, so there's probably
more here than any human being can actually master.
But let's get some of the basics of this.
Now, last time we looked at the five styles and I showed you how to take the style and
formatting box and dock it to the left side of your screen, and I hope you've done that
in Libra Office, whether or not you've also decided to turn on non-printing characters,
I'll leave that to your discretion, but at least you know that it's there.
Believe me, when you have a document that is giving you trouble and you're trying to figure
out, you know, why is it doing this?
We have not perfected the do what I mean, not what I say technology.
Someday that may happen, but for the moment, computers do whatever we tell them to.
And so it's helpful when you can't figure out why the computer is doing something to turn
on non-printing characters and take a look, but enough of that for now.
I just opened up a brand new document, as I've said before, when I opened up a brand new
document, it opens up on heading one because that's how my default template has been set
up to do that.
Now, if I take a look at the styles and formatting box that's docked on the left side of my
screen, if I right-click on heading one, I see a menu, it's a fairly short menu, it only
has two items, new and modify.
Now, as you might expect, new would let me create a whole new style, and we will do that
because there's one that I almost always create, but for the moment, I'm going to go to modify.
And when I click modify, I come up with a window that has all of the properties for the
style.
And if I've counted correctly, there are 12 different tabs, so a lot of stuff going on
here.
I'm not even sure I can get through all of it in one episode, it might take me a couple
to get through this.
All of these paragraph styles are going to have the same kinds of thing.
Now, paragraph styles, by the way, are among the more complicated things we're going to
do.
Character styles are fairly simple in contrast, but if we take a look at a paragraph style,
the very first tab is the one that says organizer.
And on the organizer tab, the first line says name, and the name is heading one, okay?
Not surprising there.
And then next to it, there is a checkbox, and the checkbox says auto update.
Now that should be blank by default, and you want it to be blank, and let me explain
why.
Auto update is a feature that if you have checked that, what would happen, and now granted,
in my documents, I only have one heading, one heading one, because I could, it's good
there heading one, the title of the document, but let's say I was looking at a different
style, like a paragraph style, or a text style, or something like that.
If I had auto update checked, what would happen is, let's say I'm on page 43 of a long document,
and I suddenly decide, well, this particular paragraph in my document, I'm going to make
italic for some reason, maybe it's a quote, or it's just something I wanted to emphasize
or whatever.
If I had auto update selected, Libra Office Writer would say, oh, you just changed your paragraph
to be italic, that must mean, because you've selected auto update, you want all of your
paragraphs to be italic, and it will go ahead and change them.
You can see why I never turned this one, okay?
There's probably someone somewhere that really needs this, I'm not exactly sure why, it
strikes me as an odd sort of thing, but maybe someone's going to write back to me and
say, well, actually, I use it, and here's why, and it'll make sense, and that's fine.
I learn stuff all the time, but believe me, I turn it off.
Under that is a thing that says, next style.
Now to understand next style, let's go back to this whole thing about paragraph level
styles.
We're in the paragraph style section of the styles in formatting, and remember we said
last time, a paragraph is what happens every time you hit the enter key.
You finish one paragraph level object and you start another paragraph level object, okay?
So two parts to that, when I hit enter, I'm ending one object and I'm starting another
object.
What will that next object be?
Well, that's what you choose here in next style, because if you take a look at that drop
down, you see you have a number of different options.
Now the way I have mine set up is that heading one, my next style is going to be heading
two.
Now, that fits my workflow.
If it doesn't fit your workflow, figure out what does.
The reason that fits my workflow is I do a lot of documentation and memos and technical
writing and things like that where it makes sense.
So heading one is centered, bold, large type at the top of the page, and as soon as I
hit the enter key, I go to heading two, which is the heading of my first major section
of the document.
That works for me.
Now, what is that linked with?
That's the next thing.
And this is where I want to go back to something we talked about before, objects, and I said,
it might be a little abstract, but hang on to this.
And one of the things about objects is that they have inheritance.
And inheritance can happen here if I link this with another style.
So generally speaking, I do not want to do this.
There are special cases for it.
And actually, headings would be a good example of a special case.
But for the moment, let's think about what this means.
If I have a link, let's say that I have linked this style with another style, and it's the
style for marginalia, whatever.
And at some point, I decide to change the style for marginalia.
Give it a different font, make it a different size, whatever.
If this is linked to that, I would change this style automatically when I change the
one it's linked to.
And that's what the linkage means.
So as a general rule, I say, set the linked width to none.
Do not link one style to another.
Most of the time, that's going to get you into trouble.
Now, the one place where that might make sense is with headings.
But you got to be careful here, because if you do that, one of the things about headings
is because there's different levels.
There's heading one, heading two, heading three, heading four.
I want to make use of a visual language that is going to allow each of those to appear
different.
So as a general rule, I leave everything unlinked.
So that's what's on the organizer.
Now, if I take a look at right under that, there's a category.
If this is a built in style, like heading one, it's already been assigned to category.
If I were to create a style, I could select which category it goes in.
And when we create one, we'll see how that works.
And then under that, we've got contains, well, here's what mine says, contains Western
text, liberation sands plus 145 percent.
So if the font is liberation sands, the size is 145 percent, and it says plus bold, right?
So it is bold, plus centered, plus numbering parentheses outline, plus one.
So it's the first level, if we were outlining, it is the highest or first level of outlining.
Indent, left, 0.3 inch, indent, right, 0.0 inch, in other words, no, right, indent.
From top, 0.0 inch, from bottom, 0.180 inch, plus keep with next paragraph, okay?
It says all of that.
Now, this is, it's a description.
You can't change it from here, but in fact, every single thing that it says here is
adjustable on one of the other tabs.
So let's take a look at the other tabs now.
Next one is indents and spacing, okay?
Indents and spacing, I see indent before the text, 0.3 inches, 0.30 inches is what it says.
Okay.
After text, 0, first line, 0, automatic, then spacing, above, below, paragraph, then
line spacing, register, true, all kinds of good stuff.
So what does it all mean?
Well, first thing I'm going to note in passing here is that my settings reflect things in
inches.
If you're in Europe or some other civilized part of the world, it would probably be in centimeters,
but I'm in the United States and we just don't get along with the metric system for some
odd reason.
And writer knows that I'm in the United States, so it has set things for inches.
Now, what do each of these things mean?
So the first setting is for before the text, which for minus 0.30 inches, or if it was
in Europe, it might be 0.64 centimeters or what have you.
And that is going to control the space between the left margin of the page and the left most
part, okay?
So now mine is centered anyway, so it might not even be noticeable that there's any indent
at all or something like this.
But if I had a really long title that would start to affect something in a very subtle
way, then after text does the same thing on the right side, then first line, which for
a centered heading, it shouldn't make any difference.
But when I talk about paragraph styles later, I'm going to talk about first line because
I was taught was that every paragraph, the very first line should be indented, and that's
where you could make a setting to do that here.
But for a heading, it doesn't really matter.
Automatic, okay?
What you're doing there is you're basically saying to Libra office writer, you figure it
out.
So you could check that and not worry about it, leave it blank, I don't know that that
makes a whole lot of difference.
Now then, the spacing has to do with the lines above and below.
How much space above and below?
And this is worth thinking about a little bit, you know, everyone is a little bit different.
So I'm looking at a heading, now I'm already on a page, my page style says that I've got
a margin at the top of the page.
So I'm not at the very top of the page anyway, I'm, you know, let's say an inch down or
whatever measurement you would normally use.
If I were to put spacing above the paragraph, it would move my heading down even further
by however much space I put in.
I don't want that, so I have it set to zero.
There's really no reason for it here.
Where you have to be careful about this, there's, there's a good use for the spacing.
But what you have to worry about is when you have multiple elements on a page and some
have spacing above and some have spacing below and if one follows the, you know, you could
have something where this element had spacing below the paragraph and it's followed by
an element that has spacing above the paragraph and you have now this huge space between the
two of them.
So that can get a little weird.
I tend to forget most of the time about putting space above anything and simply do below.
So what I do for paragraph level objects is I have it set to, and generally my rule again
minus an inches is 0.18 inches, which works out to roughly a blank line in my 12 point
type, that sort of thing.
So you could, if you set it that way, what happens is that when you hit the enter key for
a paragraph level object, instead of going immediately to the next line, it adds whatever
amount of space you've specified here, I like my paragraphs to have a little bit of space
between them.
So again, I set generally 0.18 inches, then the next thing you have here is the spacing.
That has to do with the line spacing, rather, that has to do with individual lines.
The spacing section itself was about paragraph level objects.
So I could have space separating paragraph level objects, but have the actual paragraphs
or whatever be single spaced, which I very often would.
So what are the line spacing default is single, all right?
So every line is a single line, and it's really just based on the font size.
You could have it set to one and a half lines.
You could have it set to double.
Now one of the things that you might start thinking about here is that these settings
depend on what it is you're trying to do.
I have in my past, for instance, I was a college professor at one point, and the standard
for student papers was they were supposed to be double spaced.
So if you simply set up your style to have double spacing, you would get that result automatically.
There are certain circumstances where there might be a style guide that says, this is
the way things ought to be.
If you were in college, a teacher might tell you, we're going to use this particular style
guide or you want to submit something to a publication and they say, well, this is
our style guide, you have to match this.
So that's where you would look to set the line spacing.
And proportional lets you fine tune that a little bit.
So 100% would be a single line, 200% would be double line, you know.
So if you didn't like 1.5 and you said, I want to be 1.6 lines, you know, set it for 160
percent then.
So that lets you fine tune all of that.
Then there's at least, so that's my guess, that's a minimum value for the line spacing.
Then there's something called, I'm not sure how this is pronounced, leading or letting.
I think it's letting because I think it comes from the print.
And that lets you control the height of the vertical space from the bottom of the font
of the line above to the top of the font of the line below.
So in other words, think about this as what happens when you have a drop down letter
like a G on one line and a stick up letter like an F on the next.
So that lets you fine tune that a little bit.
Most of the time you probably would have no reason to ever do any of this.
And fixed lets you enter an exact value for line spacing.
So that's what's going on with that particular tab.
So alignment, that's another good one.
So I have left, right, center, justified, well, you know, this isn't rocket science on
this one.
Left aligned means everything lines up to the left margin.
Right means everything lines up on the right margin.
So, you know, flush left, flush right, et cetera, it's going to happen here.
Center.
Now, for my heading one, I have it set to center.
Justified is a, basically is trying to make everything line up perfectly on both sides.
Now most books are published with justified because they want everything to line up perfectly
on both the left and the right.
Now in order to accomplish this, you have to fudge things.
And so if you're reading a text that has been justified every once in a while, you will
see that there are large spaces between words on a particular line.
And that's because there's probably, they're trying to figure out how do we fit these
words in and make the margins line up exactly.
And that was the only way they could come up with it was to start plugging in all of that.
So they add all those spaces to make it line up, you know, basically for the stuff that
I do, it's either left or center, most of the time.
There's rarely a case where I need to do a, I mean, there are certain things that
you might have flushed over to the right, but generally speaking, left or center does most
of mind.
But if you do go with justified, note that one of the things that it lets you do is say,
well, what about the last line?
You imagine if you're trying to line these up, suppose the last line only has a couple of
words.
You put one all the way over to the left and the other all the way over to the right.
And that would look really stupid.
So it says it gives you a couple of options here, and I'll just put it all over to the
left.
That's where most people would expect it to center it or justify it.
In which case, guess what, you're going to get one word all the way over to the left
and the other word all the way over to the right.
And then there's the thing about expanding a single word.
You know, if you only had one word at the bottom, do you just leave it all the way over
to the left or whatever, or do you actually try and space the individual letters out?
That's really weird, but you know, stuff like that happens.
Finally, text to text alignment.
This is one of those things.
If you are not a really dedicated graphic designer and publishing, you can ignore.
Has to deal with when you have two different fonts on one line that may be of different
sizes and characteristics, and how do you vertically line them up, and do you line them
up a common baseline, or at the top or the bottom, it gets a little fussy.
Well, it looks like I've gone on for a bit of time here, and we've only made it through
a couple of tabs of this box here.
So we've still got a whole lot to do.
But for now, this is Ahuka signing off, and don't forget to support FreeSoftware.
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