Episode: 1315
Title: HPR1315: LibreOffice 09 Writer Working With Paragraph-Level Styles
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1315/hpr1315.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:27:05

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Hello, this is Ahuka. Welcome to Hacker Public Radio and to the next in our
ongoing series on Libra Office Writer. What we have done in the last few
episodes is we introduced the idea of paragraph-level styles. We showed how to
create or in some cases modify the styles so that they work the way you want
them to. But I think at this point it probably makes a little bit of sense to
start tying up what's going on here because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense
to create all these styles if you don't understand in terms of your workflow how
you're going to actually use them when you are creating documents. And so I want
to spend a little bit of time on that today. Now, depending on the situation, let's
say you're going to create some new text. You know, you're starting a brand new
document or whatever. In a case like that, you know, it's not terribly hard. So you
can, I did recently at Ohio Linux Fest, I opened a class there. All right? I was
given a chance to do. It's about a two-hour class for newcomers and the idea was
that I would do a brief look at all of Libra Office. That's a lot to do in two
hours. Okay? So you want to get people's attention. So what I did is, you know, on my
laptop, I just opened up a new document and then just took my hands, you know, made a
big deal out of just taking my hands off the keyboard the minute it opened. And turned
everyone and said, what do you see? Now, it took a few moments for them to start getting
into it. But soon they started pointing out, oh, the document started with a heading
one. Yep, that's right. Then they noticed, hey, the cursor, technically the insertion
mark, because there is a difference, was in the middle of the line. Yeah. Of course,
I had set my default template to always start with a heading one and my style properties
for heading one said that it would be centered. Then they noticed that the font was liberation
sands, that it was bold, that the size was, oh, something like 17 points, something points,
they did whatever the equivalent of the 145% that I had set in my properties. So that's
a lot of settings already in place just for opening a document. So then I typed a title
for my document, probably something really brilliant like, this is a test document. And
then very dramatically and ostentatiously used one finger to press the enter key. And this
immediately jumped down two lines because my heading one style included a blank line after
the heading one object in my properties. Remember, we talked about that, we talked about
headings. It also jumped to the left of the page and changed the style to heading two with
a font of liberation sands, size 16, bold, and italic. This happened because in my properties
for heading one, I had set it that the next style would always be heading two. And all
of the rest of the settings were part of the properties for heading two. Again, I got
a lot done just for one press of the key. So I then typed a subsection setting. Again,
something really brilliant like, this is my first major section. And then again, very
dramatically used one finger to press the enter key. This time it jumped two lines just
as before because my style properties for heading two also included a blank line after.
Instead of being all the way to the left margin, it was indented a half inch. And then
you could see that the style had just changed to paragraph because my properties for heading
two specified that the next style should be paragraph. The font had just changed to
liberation's serif 12 point and there was no bolder italic. Of course, this was all from
my paragraph style properties. I typed a few sentences and then did the one finger press
of the enter key one more time and it jumped down two lines. Yes, I had a blank line after
the paragraph style as well. It was already indented again and ready for my next paragraph.
This was because my paragraph style properties said the next style should be paragraph. Now
the point of this is that a one time investment in setting this up can yield time savings
forever. Now, what we were looking at there is a situation where we had a lot of pre-program
stuff go again that said with this style follow with this other style next and so on.
As I say, all based on probabilities, what happens if that's not where you want to go
next? There's going to be situations where you need to change things on the fly. How do we
do that? Well, that's not hard either. If you take a look at your Libra office writer screen,
there is a drop down box right above that docked styles and formatting window on the left.
Darn, we'll better have that docked on the left where I'm going to get you. Right above
that is a drop down box and it may be saying something like paragraph or whatever. If you
have a completely unmodified Libra office, it might say something like text body or something.
So, that is called the apply style drop down. So, to use that, you place your blinking insertion
mark anywhere within the object you want to apply the style to. This is commonly done
by just clicking on it. Now, I distinguish between a cursor and an insertion mark. They
really are two different things and people use them interchangeably and that's just sloppy
thinking. So, what's the difference? My cursor is the thing the mouse moves around, right?
Which for me, it kind of looks like an arrowhead and as I move the mouse, it's moving all
over the screen and I can click on all of that kind of stuff. Insertion mark is generally
speaking a vertical line that is blinking or flashing in your document. And what it's
saying is whatever you type on the keyboard is going to show up right here. Okay? Two
different things entirely. So, let's start using proper terminology. So, the insertion
mark is that blinking thing in the document. So, you can put your insertion mark in a particular
word or paragraph or whatever by simply clicking on it. So, all you have to do is put your
insertion mark in a paragraph and go to that drop down and select a different type of
different style. Okay? That's going to be giving you paragraph level styles up there
anyway. So, select it. You know, you make it a change of paragraph to a heading or what
have you. Now, that's good enough. So, for instance, let's say I'm typing along of just
done three paragraphs and I need to put in another header. Well, what happens? I press
the enter key. My definition of the paragraph style says always follow a paragraph with another
paragraph. So, it very obediently drops down two lines. The indents in a half inch.
Paragraph is ready to go. And so, okay. But now I want, let's say, a heading three to go
there. So, I go to that drop down and I look for heading three and select that and all
of a sudden my insertion mark instead of being indented a half inch is going to jump over
to the left margin or jump over to wherever I've set it up for my heading three. All right?
Mine is at the left margin, you know, yours is wherever you put it. And all of a sudden,
I will have all of the heading three definitions, whatever font, et cetera. It will instantly
change over. You can do it with an existing, let's say, you had typed something and it's
a, oh, wait a minute. For some reason, my entire paragraph came out as a heading three, which
looks really weird. Just put your insertion mark in there anywhere in the paragraph and then
change the style from heading three to paragraph and it will change it. Now, that drop down
is pretty useful. It has a few default styles and it has styles generally that you have
already used in this document. But suppose there's a style that you have not used yet in this
document, it's not in the drop down, but it is in your styles and formatting window as
an available style. Well, that's pretty easy too. So put your insertion mark either, you know,
if it's on a blank line, beginning a paragraph level object or put your insertion mark within
whatever object you want and double click on that style in the styles and formatting window.
And this will both apply the style to that object and add it to the drop down because now it
sees, oh, yes, this is one that you're using. How can this help you? I'm going to give an example
from my own experience. Some years ago, I was working for a college, I think I've mentioned
before, probably, in one of these things. And I was given the task of assembling the catalog
for the entire college and annual event. I say assembling because writing the content was left
to each department. But we have a lot of departments. Some of them are administrative, registrar, financial
grades, student activities, blah, blah, blah. Some of them are academic, history, physics, sociology, music.
So in the final analysis, I got documents sent to me from maybe 40 or 50 different departments and
no two of them were done the same way. There was a mess. Now, I can't publish a catalog by just
sticking all these things together in one big document and sending it out. It would be horrible.
So what I had to do is create some uniformity. So the first thing I did was take each document
submitted to me. And fortunately, it was all electronic submissions. Otherwise, I probably would have just
quit my job and moved our gentiner or something. But there was all electronics. So what I had to do was at first,
I had to go through and start assigning styles functionally. I didn't care how each style would
look at this point. I just needed to understand this is a heading two. This is a heading three.
This is a paragraph and so on. And just go through all of this stuff and just assign styles to each object.
So a paragraph is a paragraph. A list is a list. A heading is a heading.
None of this had been done on anything because none of the people doing it knew what they were doing.
Except possibly political science because I had a friend in the political science department who actually
was a real expert on word processing. So he probably did it right. But pretty much no one else did.
Heading some lists were the biggest headache. None of the headings were labeled.
And I need to put them in a logical order. Which one was a heading one? Which was heading two?
Which was a heading three? And what tends to happen in cases like this, people,
because they think visually rather than think logically, is they would do things like change the font.
I'll make this bigger. I'll make it bold. I'll make it italic. All the stuff that we talked about,
we talked about heading styles. That was in there. But you really had to kind of think.
And so each submission I got, there was a heading two at the very top of that particular document.
Normally I would have said heading one, but heading one was going to be the title of the whole document.
Or I could have made heading one that each section it did. It's not a religious thing.
Now at the list, it got really weird. No one used styles. Some of the lists had been done using repeated presses of the tab key,
trying to get things to line up instead of using tab styles with leaders.
Which we had talked about in the last episode. And when you know how to do it, that's really wonderful.
But none of them knew how to do it. Again, except possibly my friend in the political science department.
I don't remember what he submitted at this point.
So I had to go through each document and assign the appropriate style to each element of the document.
So fortunately, that's not hard. I just started applying styles the way I described above.
And you know, just go to the drop down and say this is a paragraph. This is a paragraph. This is a heading three. This is a list and so on.
And again, I didn't worry about how it appeared at this point. I just wanted to get the right functional description there.
Because I could always change the appearance easily. I could have a 300 page document and say, I want to change all of my lists.
And all I have to do is change the style for lists and the whole document updates. It's wonderful if you do it right the first time.
So that was that was my example of going through and putting functional tags and all of these things.
Now, how do we change the style properties? Because I said this would be real easy. Okay. That's that's again, that's not too hard.
So my college catalog 200 pages, roughly multiple headings, multiple levels of headings, multiple lists, some numbered, some bulleted, quite a few tab leader lists.
Not easy keeping this in order, but styles made it a lot easier. So what happens if some vice president looks at a draft and decides she doesn't like the fact that all heading three styles had italic fonts and asked me to change all of them?
Well, I could go through all 200 pages of the document looking for each heading three and manually changing each one of them. And I would probably shoot myself.
How mind-numbingly stupid is that? Ah, but that no. By using the styles properly, not probably not.
All I have to do is just change the definition of the style. Now, let's think about this for a second. What template are we working with? Remember templates are the containers that hold all of these things.
Now, I've talked about the default template. The default template is how I set up all of my documents by default.
The default template says when I open Libra Office Writer and I get that blank page in front of me, what properties is that blank page going to have? And that's the default template and it's going to have all of my styles and all of this stuff.
Well, in this particular case, let's think about it. If I'm in my default template and I need to create a style that I need that has the properties, I can do a find and replace to swap out the styles.
So, in this case, I could say I'll create a new heading three style, call it heading three 1.1. I could begin by clicking on heading three once to select it, should now be highlighted.
I then go to the top right of my styles and formatting window, which is docked on the left, right? And that is the new style from selection drop down.
All right, found that. So, it's in the styles and formatting window.
So, the button on the right says new style from selection, it's a drop down. And it has a paragraph mark on it, so that makes it easy for you to pick it out.
Click it, select new style from selection, this will create a copy of the existing style, which you can edit.
So, change the name to heading three 1.1 and change the font from italic to one without italic, then do a find and replace.
You go to the edit menu, select find and replace. In the window that comes up, make sure you click more options.
Now, this is true in every word processing program I've ever dealt with in many other programs. Find and replace gives you a very basic window.
And then there's usually something that says, if you want to do something more complicated, click here. And then the window expands and gives you all sorts of more options.
So, click the more options in that find and replace window. And at the bottom there's a check, there's a box towards the bottom that says search for styles.
So, make sure you check that box, and then the search for and replace with drop downs will be populated with styles.
The search for will have all the styles that are in use in your document, and the replace with will have all the styles that are available to you.
Now, I said I would do it this way if I was in a document based on my default template, and the reason is I don't want to change my default style definition.
If I make this change and save the document, when I go to my next new document, the new style I created will not be there because I never made it part of the template.
It will still be in the document itself, but it won't be in my template.
Remember, if you want to have a style permanently available to you, you need to save it in a template.
Now, in the case of the college catalog, what I would probably recommend, I think the best way to do it is create a specific template just for that purpose.
And then I don't have to worry about my default template getting muddied up with what other people want to see in the catalog.
It can stay there, and I've got a template for the catalog, do exactly what people want, and then I can just modify the style.
And that's even faster, though all you have to do is just right click on the style in the styles and formatting window.
Select modify, and just go in and change it from a talc to one without a talc, and you're done.
Or, as some people like to say, Bob's your uncle.
So, you know, this is an example of how you work with all of this stuff in a day-to-day workflow, and I hope that's going to be useful and helpful to you.
And so, this is Ahuka signing off and reminding you, as always, please support FreeSoftware. Thank you.
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