Episode: 1355
Title: HPR1355: LibreOffice 13 Writer A Bullet Style Deconstructed
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1355/hpr1355.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:06:21

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Hello, this is Ahuka and welcome to Hacker Public Radio for our ongoing series on Libra
Office focusing for now on Libra Office Writer.
Last time I talked to you about the list styles and we introduced what list styles are about.
We took a look at the style properties window, so we got some good things accomplished.
Now what I want to do is I want to take a look at a specific case of a bullet style and
we're going to deconstruct this bullet style.
Take a look at the various properties and see what makes it tick.
Now, we're just learning how styles work.
We do want to be careful.
I think very often the best way to learn this stuff is to experiment.
Go in, make a change to a style, use it in the document and see what happens.
However, if you change a style and you make the mistake of being in a template, you could
actually change the style forever.
Maybe that's not a terribly likely thing to happen, but one of the things you can do,
if you, and this is useful in your experimenting, you can flip back and forth, is to make
a new style based on some other style, make one modification and then see what you get
out of that.
So, if you want to do that, just select a style.
For instance, I'm going to use the List4 style as an example here, but actually, since
you can't see my graphics, it really doesn't matter to you, does it.
But if I click on that and then I go all the way to the right at the top, I can choose
to make a new style based on style 4, in this case.
And I can change something in that and my original style is completely untouched, so I can go
back and look at that at any time.
Should you ever get to the point that you want this stuff to be available to you permanently
because you're creating styles, remember that what you need to do, as we've talked about
before, you need to open up the template and modify the template to have that style added.
If it's a style that you want available to you and all of your documents, that means
you have to edit the default template.
We've talked about all of this before, so I'm not going to go into a lot more detail
about that now.
So when we do this, in this particular case, I'll take my List4 and I'm going to click
on it and then right click and select modify and it's going to bring up the properties
window.
Now we saw before that the first tab, the organizer tab, everything's grayed out because
it's a built-in style.
There's really no options you have to change on the organizer tab.
But if we take a look at the second one, the second tab bullets, you have eight different
options here and let's take a look at each of those.
The first one are just your standard bullets.
It's a reasonably small dot and then going across the top, the next one is a very large
dot, significantly larger than the other.
Third one is a diamond, the fourth one is a square.
And on the second row, the fifth and sixth ones are different types of arrow, essentially.
Then we've got one that has an X followed by one that has a check mark and they're both
one is called a check box, the other is a tick box and a tick mark, I think is what it's
called.
So those are things they all come from fonts that are installed on your computer and they
come with Libra Office, I believe.
And so let's say you wanted to change from the standard bullet to a diamond.
Well, all you would do is you would click on the space that has the diamonds and you
would see a thick black border around that space that tells you, ah, that's been selected
and then you could click apply and if you apply, it'll apply it to whatever object on
the document you were in when you did that.
So you could turn a ordinary paragraph into the beginning of a bullet list with diamonds
if you clicked on that third box while your insertion mark was in a paragraph somewhere.
Now that's a nice group of options there.
What else can we do?
Well if we go and we're going to skip over numbering style because it doesn't really
apply to bullets very much and we'll click on skip over outline for now and go to graphics.
Now with graphics what you get are many similar options but now we're working with actual
images and you've got several of them here.
So the differences are mostly colors and stuff like that.
So the first one is blue and we go round dot diamond square star right pointing arrow.
And then we get the same five choices in red and then the same five choices in green
and so on.
So these are say they're in color and that they are actually graphics.
So there's no font choice involved, it's a graphics.
Now the last tab options is kind of interesting because there's a feature there that lets
you select whatever graphics you like but it's not readily apparent when you first go
there.
So if you go there you take a look at the top drop down it says numbering and if you're
in a bullet style you'll have bullets selected.
But click the drop down and there's something called graphics.
So if you select that all of a sudden three more options appear and the three options are
graphics with and height.
Interesting so we could go in and click on the select that's next to the graphics and
that's a drop down and the very first option you get there is from file.
So if you had a file on your computer that had a graphic image that you wanted to use
as a bullet this is where you could select that make that happen.
So you've got a number of options here for appearance but what I want to get into now
is one of the things that puzzles people and I referred with a little bit last time
is something that puzzled this fellow at Ohio Linux Fest the position tab.
Now I think for all lists whether it's bullet or numbered understanding how this works
is going to be important in giving you the control that you want.
So you can have control over the precise position of every part of the list from the bullets
or numbers where they are on the page to how much space is between the bullet or number
and the text and where the text is located.
So we're going to cover this in detail now for bullets okay we're going to look at it
again when we get to numbered lists.
So the first item says numbering followed by and again it's just this you know Libra
Office can't figure out sometimes what it's talking about it does obviously run a bullet
list there's no numbering at all.
So it really should say bullet followed by but it says numbering followed by so let's
just accept that.
So for list four this has it set for space now what does that mean?
That means there is one space between the bullet and the text so to be just as if you typed
the character for a bullet hit the space bar and then started typing your text only it
does it automatically and we'll do it over and over and over I mean then that's that's
the point of a style.
So what other options do we have well let's click the drop down.
You could choose nothing and nothing means no space at all.
So that would just be that would be like you clicked the button character and then immediately
started typing the third option tab stop that gives you much more control.
So if you select this you then see another little thing pop up on the screen that says
where this goes where's my tab stop now I am on an American installation of Libra Office
so all of my measurements are in inches.
I'm going to trust you to make the adjustments.
I can see from the Libra Office documentation that if you're in other countries it would
be in centimeters and that's that's fine I would if we could get the United States to
switch that would be wonderful I'm starting to think that'll never happen in my lifetime.
So anyway I set as an experiment let's say 0.3 inches 3 tenths of an inch and what does
that do.
Well it will move the text to the 3 tenths of an inch mark on the page.
Now what that means we want to be very careful here it is measuring from the left margin.
So that 3 tenths of an inch it's 3 tenths of an inch from the left margin not from where
the bullet is alright small but subtle difference okay so all of the positioning options in
fact are set with respect to the left margin there's several more numbering alignment you
have three options there left center and right and an under it and aligned at setting these
work together how do they work well let's start with the aligned at if you have it set
to 0 0.0 inches what that means is your alignment is right on the margin of the page if you
want it aligned differently say you wanted your list moved over you could say align everything
at point two inches that's two tenths of an inch and that would just shift everything
to the right by that amount so it's where are we lining everything up on the page is what
the aligned at is about then what's the left center and right well if you choose left that
means the left side of the bullet will line up precisely at the margin now I say precisely it
depends on how the character itself is defined the character may be defined with a little space
around it that is going to make this look slightly different from what you expect but in essence
left aligned means the left side of the bullet will line up at the margin now that that's normally
what you expect to see right in in other words you have a margin of the page and then the bullet comes
right after that and then maybe a little bit of space and then the text if you choose center the
bullet will be centered on the margin which is an interesting kind of thing and then if you choose
right as your alignment it means the right edge of the bullet would be lined up on the margin
this is a very counter intuitive that's why I'm being very careful to explain this you look at
a bullet and you think well if I click right isn't it going to move it to the right no it actually
moves it to the left because what it's doing is it's okay I've got a move to the left so that the
right hand side of the bullet lines up on the margin if you're having trouble picturing this as I
say it the best thing to do is just open up a blank document and play around with us a little bit
and I think it'll start to make sense that it's one of those things that that does tend to puzzle people
now the last option on the position is called indent at this says what happens to the text if
your bullet point is more than one line long for a lot of bullets that's not something that's
going to crop up but there are situations where that does so let's say you're working on a
on a bullet list and one bullet item is running to three lines worth of text now in a word
processor of course you never hit enter you just keep typing and it wraps around to the next
line and keeps going but when it does wrap around to the next line where does that next line begin
if you would left indent at set to zero then the second line of that bullet point would line up
right on the margin in other words it would be lined up the same as the bullet above it which is
very weird but you do have that control what normally people would want to do is probably set the
indent at at exactly the same as the tab stop because if you do that then your text lines up
perfectly so that if say the tab stop was three tenths of an inch from the left margin if the
indent is also three tenths of an inch from the left margin well you text is just going to line up
perfectly if you want to have some fun and create what's called a hanging paragraph effect you
could set your indent at to be a little bit more than the tab stop so let's say the tab stop was
three tenths of an inch indent at was a half an inch or five tenths you know that has the effect
that the subsequent lines are have even more of a gap from the margin and that's what's called
a hanging paragraph so you can set it up whatever way you want but that's how you control all of that
so with this I think we have now covered the topic of bullet lists in some detail
and so I'm going to leave this for now this is a hukka for hacker public radio reminding all of
you please never forget to support free software goodbye
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