Episode: 1345
Title: HPR1345: LibreOffice 12 Writer List Styles Introduced
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1345/hpr1345.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:54:50

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Hello, this is Ahuka.
Welcome to Hecker Public Radio and to another in our ongoing series about Libra Office.
And in this case, we are still on Libra Office writer as we probably will be for some time
to come yet.
There's an awful lot to discuss here.
We've looked at a couple of different types of styles.
So if you recall back to when we first looked at the styles and formatting window that there
were five kinds of styles mentioned.
There were paragraph styles, character styles, frame styles, page styles, and list styles.
And we've already discussed paragraph styles and character styles.
I'm going to go to list styles next.
Even though that is the fifth one in there, I think it makes sense to go there now.
And there are some interesting things about page styles and frame styles that deserve
bringing those together.
But to do that, I've got to bring in some stuff about page layout.
So I think it just makes more sense to get list styles in here now.
So I'm going to do an introduction to list styles for this particular episode.
Now lists are something that you use very frequently in documents.
And there are good reasons to create styles for this purpose.
First of all, a style gives you full control very easily.
You can set the amount of indentation, the line spacing, numbering, characters used.
There's quite a few different things you can set there.
Second, by creating a style for this, you have consistency compared to using the buttons
on the formatting toolbar.
And finally, by using styles, you can make changes later much more easily than if you manually
formatted your lists.
So for instance, if you wanted to say, change the font used in a style, you could do that
easily even in a very long document by just adjusting the style and the whole document
would update.
You could change the spacing, the indentation, what have you.
And by doing it in a style, it becomes very easy to update the entire document.
Now again, I'm just going to remind everyone, styles live inside of templates.
So if you were creating a style that you wanted to save for future use, if you wanted it
generally available, you should save it inside your default template, or if you are creating
a template for a special project, you'd want to save the style you create in that project.
So we've talked about all of that before.
So I'm not going to go into all of the details involved in doing that right now.
You can go back and review earlier episodes or go to my website, www.ahooka.com.
And if you take a look at the Libra Office tutorials there, you'll see all of that information.
Now taking a look at list styles, the first thing we want to point out is that they're
really a particular case of paragraph styles.
And what do I mean by that?
If you go back and look to where I first introduced styles and talked about this, I talked about
the paragraph mark and every time you hit the enter key, a paragraph mark gets placed
in the document.
And that's an indication that you have finished a paragraph level object of some kind.
So if you turn on non-printing characters, just start a little test document to take a
look at this.
You turn that on so that you see the paragraph marks.
And then just for this purpose, click on the button for a numbered list and just start
creating a list real fast, make it a shopping list, milk, eggs, cheese, butter, meat, vegetables.
And as you do that note that after each item on the list, you hit the enter key.
And when you take a look at the document, you'll see the paragraph mark put in there.
That's an indication you're dealing with a paragraph level object.
So why didn't we do this within paragraph styles the way we did before?
And the real reason is that lists have some special qualities and capabilities and things
that are just a little different from what you do in ordinary paragraph styles.
And that's why Libra Office sets them up as a separate style category.
And this is why I think we should deal with them separately.
Now the fact that they are another instance of paragraph styles means that a lot of the
stuff we've already learned is going to carry over the same dialogue boxes are used.
Many of the settings are similar.
So that's the first thing we want to get out of the way.
The second thing is the concept of nested lists.
And that's when there's a list within a list.
What do we mean?
Let's say I was putting together a list of all of the tasks I needed to do.
And so Saturday morning, I've got some chores, what have you.
So I list there's five things I need to do on Saturday.
Well, let's say one of those five things was go to the store and pick up things.
Well, then within that list, I could insert another list that went with that item
and go to the store that listed the things that I need to buy.
Or if I needed to go to the mall, what are the stores that I need to visit,
stuff like that.
That's an example of a nested list.
Another example of a nested list is an outline.
So if you have ever created an outline and if you haven't,
it's worth looking at.
It's a very good way of organizing your thoughts about something.
So if I take a look at, for instance, how I've organized what I'm doing with Libra Office,
I've got Libra Office and then one of the components.
So I list the various components.
Writer, Calc, Impress, Base, Draw, and so on.
And then within each of those, I could break it down further
and say, well, for writer, I'm looking at key concepts like templates and styles
and page layout and mail merges, things like that.
And then within each of those, it can get broken down.
So on styles, we've recorded, I think, this may be the eighth thing
that I've recorded just on styles.
So that's an example of a nested list.
Very useful kinds of things to have.
And that's one of the things we can do with lists
that we don't do with ordinary paragraphs and things like that.
Now, one of the things that we have to just watch out
for terminology is going to be just a little flaky here.
Libra Office is not consistent.
They use different terminology to talk about the same thing.
So the styles that we're talking about are sometimes called list styles
in other places they're called numbering styles
or sometimes just numbering.
It can get very confusing.
You can open up the properties of a bullet list
and it will say numbering style.
You say, well, I'm not numbering anything,
but it just fills that in as the title of that window.
I'm just going to call these things list styles
when I'm talking about it generically
or I will specifically say numbered or bulleted list
if I want to talk about either one, and I will, of course,
want to talk about each of those separately.
So by using a style, there are a number
of interesting pieces of control.
Now the main reason, as I said, the main reason for using styles
is that you can define things the way you want it
and if it's saved in the template,
you hit that available to you all the time.
There's a lot of stuff you can do in the properties of a style.
Example, last year, I did a session at Ohio Linux Fest
that was an introduction to Libra Office.
It seemed to be pretty well received as far as I could tell.
One of the people in this session came up to me
and said, I've got this question, it's been driving me nuts
and he starts talking about a problem with the list
and it was basically that the text was getting scrunched up
against the numbering and he couldn't figure out
how to fix all of that and I said, oh, that's not hard at all.
It's all in the style.
Of course, the whole thing we've been talking about
with writer was the importance of styles.
So he wasn't surprised when I said that
and there's a thing in their position
and when we get into some details of these styles,
we'll talk about all of that.
But that was basically the answer to his question.
So we're talking about a tool that I think we wanna master
and the other thing is I've noticed that
this is one of those things that tends to frustrate
lots of people because styles very often
particularly nested list styles.
It, people do nested lists and they just get confused
and very often it's not doing what you want it to do.
And as I've said before, we have not perfected
the use of telepathy and computing yet.
So it's no good beating up on your computer
because it doesn't do what you want it to do
if that's what you're thinking of.
You have to figure out how to tell the computer
to do what you want.
And in the case of lists,
it's mastering styles is gonna let you do that.
Now, I have my styles and formatting window open
and anchored to the left hand side of the screen.
All right, remember, we've talked about that
before F11 opens it,
double click while holding down a control key
on the second row and that's gonna anchor it all
to the left hand side of the screen.
We've talked about all of this before.
And I keep mentioning it because if you're going
to master this stuff, you really need to get in the habit
of just having this thing open and using it.
Now, if we go to the fifth of the icons there,
that's the one that is gonna bring up the list for the list styles.
And when you do that, you're gonna see out of the box,
probably, at least this is what I get,
five things that say list one, list two,
list three, list four, list five.
And then five more that say numbering one,
numbering two, numbering three,
numbering four, numbering five.
Not terribly descriptive, is it?
Hmm.
Well, what do these things do?
Quickest way to test that is to open up a,
you know, test document and start assigning these styles
to different things and see what you get.
But I'm gonna cut to the chase here and tell you
that each of these styles is different.
It is sometimes a subtle difference.
The first five, list one through list five,
are for bullet lists.
And what are the differences?
Mostly the differences are what sort of character
is being used for the bullet.
Now, I emphasize character because what we have here
are really characters from fonts,
frequently the dingbats font.
There's other fonts available that you could use, I suppose.
And we'll talk about that.
It perhaps in a subsequent recording.
But the, you know, list one is what you would think of
as just a standard bullet, list two is kind of a dashed line,
a little bigger than a hyphen, maybe like an m-dash.
List three is a check box.
List four is an arrow that points to the right.
And list five is kind of like a written X.
Other than that, there's not a huge difference among these.
And that's a clue right there that a lot of the configuration
you're gonna do with bullet lists isn't choosing
what bullet you want.
Then we get to the next one.
Numbering one, numbering two, and so on through numbering five.
Obviously these are the numbered lists.
The differences can be rather subtle.
So if you choose numbering one, you get Arabic numerals.
In other words, what we in the west would write
is a one, a two, a three, that kind of thing,
followed by a period.
And then the text, there's a blank space and then the text.
If you choose numbering two, it's almost the same except there's no period.
If you choose numbering three, it is the number with no period
and kind of a large tab stop inserted,
so that the text is further off to the right.
If you choose numbering four, you get a Roman numeral
with a period after it.
And if you choose numbering five,
it's basically like numbering one with an Arabic numeral in a period
but the space between the period and the text is somewhat smaller.
And that's a very subtle difference.
But if you do a test document, you should be able to see that kind of difference.
How does it work?
Well, we're going to have to deconstruct each of these
and that's going to take us a little bit of time to get through.
But basically, if you recall how we do things with styles,
you go into the styles window,
and first you click on a style to select it,
and then you right click, and when you right click,
it pops up a window that says new or modify.
So new, you could create just from scratch a brand new style.
Modify means we're opening up the style you've selected
and then we're going to make some modifications to it.
So, take a look, let's say at list one,
select modify,
and the properties window pops up.
And it's got a number of tabs,
organizer bullets, numbering style,
outline, graphics, position, and options.
So here's all of these tabs.
Now, the first thing we're going to notice is that list one is a bullet list.
But if I look at the title of the window,
this is the properties window.
The title of the window says numbering style list one.
Remember how I said, Libra Office is very inconsistent in what they do?
And you know, maybe it'll get to be more consistent.
I have not seen Libra Office four show up in my repositories yet.
As of when I'm recording this, it just came out very recently.
When it does, you know, maybe that's one of the things they would have cleared up.
I don't know.
Now, on the first tab, it's organize, organizer, I'm sorry.
And organizer, it's got the name list one,
and then it's got linked with and category.
But those are grayed out, you can't do anything.
And that's because this is a built-in style.
So those things were already kind of set at the factory.
I suppose if you were a programmer,
you could get into the source code and mess with that if you wanted to.
But I'm assuming most people are just users.
So let's just say this is not anything you have any control over on a built-in style.
What if you wanted to change something?
Well, what you could do,
and this is useful to remember is you can create a new style based on an existing style.
And that new style, everything can be configured.
And if you take a look at the top of your styles and formatting window,
all the way to the right, the very last icon there.
And if you mouse over, it'll tell you this,
is create a new style based on the selection.
So let's say you wanted to somehow create a new list style that was linked to something.
You could do that, create a new style based on the selection,
then the linked with becomes available and you can do something.
Right now we're just kind of looking at the general stuff here.
So after organizer, the next tab is bullets.
And the bullets tab lets you choose among the different bullets that they have already set up as options for you.
And these are based on fonts.
You can change all of this if you're determined enough to do it,
and we'll talk about it when you get to the options tab.
You can start messing around and saying,
well, I want to use different characters from these fonts.
The point about the bullets window is that you've got eight options available right off the bat.
And for a lot of people, those eight options are really all they want to work with.
And it gives you something to go on and you don't have to get quite as in the weeds to select something else.
Then the third tab, numbering style.
And you can choose among Arabic numerals, Roman numerals, capital letters, lowercase letters,
all sorts of different things you can do for numbering style.
Fourth tab, it's outline.
And this is important when we get to the idea of nested lists and how we're going to control them.
That's a topic in itself.
So we'll probably have at least one, you know, maybe two episodes dealing with that,
because it's a little bit complicated, but it's important.
Then there's a fifth tab that's graphics.
And it's also for bullets.
But the difference is that the ones on the bullets tab are characters in fonts.
The one on the graphics tab are graphical images.
And that's not all we're going to see when we get to options.
There's something there.
But if you take a look at the graphics tab, it's got a lot of colored graphics that you can use.
The sixth tab is called position.
And position is where you place precisely each object within a list.
So for instance, numbering one, numbering three, numbering five, all of those had differences.
And a lot of it had to do with the positioning.
That was the problem that my friend at Ohio Linux Vest was running into.
If you use, for instance, Roman numerals on a numbered list,
your number itself can get large very quickly, as anyone who's worked with Roman numerals knows.
And it starts scrunching up into the actual text, because it wasn't set up to be far enough away,
and he didn't know how to fix that.
Well, you could do it here on the position tab, just a matter of saying,
I want to move this another tenth, or you've got some pretty fine control,
and how far you want to move the text away from the bullet or the number.
Then the very last one, the options tab, this lets you do a lot more control over nested lists
that you start work with in outline.
And it also gives you the capability of using your own graphic images for bullet lists.
It's an option that you have to kind of poke around to find, but it's actually in there,
and when we talk about bullet lists, we'll discuss that.
So we've got a lot of stuff going on with all of these lists,
and I've been talking for a while now, so that probably means it's enough.
I'm going to sign off now, and return you to your regularly scheduled programming,
but I also want to remind everyone, please, do not forget to support FreeSoftware.
Thank you.
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