hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1275.txt

Episode: 1275
Title: HPR1275: LibreOffice 05 Writer Style Properties 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1275/hpr1275.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 22:47:10

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Hello, this is Ahuka, and this is Hecker Public Radio, and I am continuing our series
on not Libra Office, focusing for the moment on Libra Office writer.
And what I want to do right now is I want to pick up from last time we started our look
at the properties that styles can have, and there's a lot going on, and that's why it's
taking us a little bit of time to get through all of this.
But I think it's important, let's see if we can get through some more of this, and get
into how we use all of this stuff.
But you need to understand what these things are about when you start taking a look at
it.
Well last time we looked at the Organizer tab, the InDense and Spacing tab, and the Alignment
tab.
So those are pretty important, but we want to continue our look.
So now I'm going to go to the Text Flow tab.
And the first part of the Text Flow has to do with hyphenation.
Hyphenation occurs when you are typing, and you get to the end of a line, and you start
typing the next word, and there's really not enough space for that word to fit.
Well, what do you do?
You have a number of options here.
And one of the options is you could simply say, well, you know, I'll just take that next
word and go to the next line.
And if you don't do anything on this tab, that's what would normally happen.
So you might type three or four letters of that word, you've run out of space.
Those three or four letters you've typed automatically jump to the next line as you
continue typing.
That's one way to handle it.
It's not necessarily a bad way.
But one of the things you can do with Libra Office, if you wish, is you can do what is
called automatic hyphenation.
Now this isn't the most sophisticated thing in the world, okay?
If you were really into grammar and writing styles and all of that, you would know that
there are rules about hyphenating, et cetera.
Libra Office doesn't know what those rules are, and those rules are probably different
for every language.
And Libra Office is a multi-language international program.
So it does kind of a brain-dead, simple thing.
If you check automatically, you can then set three things.
The first one is characters at line end, okay?
So if you set it for two characters at line end, that means there has to be at least two
characters before the hyphen, otherwise it jumps.
So you're typing a long word and you type the first letter that fits on the line, fine,
you type the second letter that fits on the line.
You type the third letter, it doesn't fit, well, you know, what happens then, a hyphen.
Well, it's not quite that simple because you have to leave space for the hyphen as well.
But what this is saying is that if you hyphenate the middle of a word, there will be at least
two letters on the first line and then the remaining letters on the other line.
Now, characters at line begin takes a look at the other side of that.
What happens if you're typing along and you've got most of the word in there, but there's
not quite enough space and so the last few letters go on the next line, do you put a hyphen
in for that?
And this says, well, there has to be at least so many letters on the second line following
that hyphen.
So you can set that here and then maximum number of consecutive hyphen says, how many
consecutive lines end with a hyphen?
And you might want to put in something there and, you know, Libra office will take care
of that.
Now the next thing we want to take a look at is breaks.
In Europe, you know, places where this becomes kind of interesting.
So what a break is, is either saying we're going to start a new section or maybe start
a new page or something like that.
Now on some kinds of documents, you might want to have a page break.
Let's say you have a long document with sections in it.
You know, a good example, think about a book.
You know, every chapter starts on a fresh page, doesn't it?
So what you could do is say, you know, if I'm putting in a chapter heading, there should
always be a page break in front of that.
And that says, start it on a fresh new page whenever that comes along.
So how would we do that?
So we would go insert a page break and then select before.
And then you can say, well, does that only apply to certain page styles or all of them
are default?
And then you can even, if you were doing automatic numbering, you could restart your numbering,
okay, which for a book that might not make sense, but for certain documents it might.
So you could say, you know, I want to, if you leave it at zero, it'll just keep going
with whatever the page numbering is, but you can automatically reset it, if you wish.
Then you've got options.
Now this is something you do want to pay attention to.
One of them would be for a style where you say, do not split the paragraph.
Now remember, when we say paragraph, we're talking about paragraph level.
So even headings are paragraphs, in that sense, they're paragraph level objects, list
items are paragraph level objects and so on.
So you could say, well, I just don't want this to be split.
Well, if that's the case, what's going to happen is if you start one of these paragraph
level objects and there's not enough room to fit it in on this page, it'll move the
whole thing to the next page.
And so the previous page, there'll be a little more blank space at the bottom than usual.
But you know, there's times where you might want to do that.
Keep with next paragraph is a really useful one for headings.
So my general rule with all headings is to always check, keep with next paragraph.
Well, think about it.
A heading is like a section title.
Would you want to have a section title at the bottom of a page and then everything that
it refers to on the next page?
That would look really stupid.
So if you say, keep with next paragraph, I'm in a long document, I'm chugging along.
And I've said, okay, this is going to be my next section.
So I put in a heading two for a major section.
And it happens I'm at the bottom of the page and you know, when I'm typing along, I'm
not really paying attention to where I am on the page necessarily.
When I hit enter and I start on a paragraph and writer looks at it and says, wait a minute,
your paragraph just went to the next page.
And so it's going to say, well, let's keep these things together, keep with next paragraph.
It would move my heading over to the next page, put it at the top of the page and then
the text would go right under it and that would all happen automatically.
Similar to that, orphan control and widow control, which are also kind of related to what
we talked about with hyphens, they're all very similar concepts.
So what are widows, what are orphans, okay?
And orphan is a single line at the bottom of the page with the rest of the paragraph
all on the following page, which also looks really stupid.
So you know, your paragraph might be 15 lines long and you've got one line at the bottom
of a page and then 14 lines on the next page that looks kind of stupid.
And so orphan control would prevent that.
Widow control, widows are when you have a single line, the last line of the paragraph goes
to the top of the next page.
And so again, you've got your 14 line paragraph, well 13 lines are on the previous page and
the very last line is on the next page and that would be a widow.
Widow and orphan control prevents that from happening.
And I like that, okay?
So how does that work?
Let's say you're typing along, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You get near the bottom of the page.
So let's say you've got a paragraph that's been going on for a while.
You've got 10, 15 lines of it already and you get to the bottom of the page and you've
jumped to the next page and you keep typing.
And let's say you only type three or four words and you're done with the paragraph.
You hit the enter key to end that paragraph.
And at that point, writer is going to look at it and say, wait a minute.
You just created a widow.
You just created a situation where most of the paragraph was on the previous page, but
only one line was on the next.
And you've checked widow controls to say you don't want that.
So what it would do is it would take that line and move it back to the other page.
And then it would, it would fudge things to make that work, all right?
Take a little out of the margin maybe, you know, whatever it needed to do to make that
work.
You're complicated, but that's basically what it does just moves it over.
Now with orphan control, and this is one of those things.
If you were actually watching the screen while you were typing, which isn't the recommended
way for touch typists, but how many of us are really good touch typists these days,
you would occasionally see something like this where you've started a paragraph and you've
typed a couple of lines and then all of a sudden, everything you've typed jumps to
the next page.
You go, oh, that was interesting.
Well, that would have been orphan control kicking in.
You started the paragraph, writer doesn't know what's going on here.
So you know, you finish the whole line, you go on to the next line, and then all of the
sudden, you keep typing in this paragraph and writer says, wait a minute, you've just
created an orphan.
You've checked orphan control, it moves everything over.
So I like widow and orphan control, whether you'd use it in headings, I don't know, it's
slightly different with headings, I always check people with next paragraph.
But for text, like actual paragraphs or body text or whatever you want to call it, I would
always check widow and orphan control, make sure that I don't have a problem there.
So that's the text flow.
The next tab is font.
This is pretty straightforward.
You basically get to choose the font.
Now when they say family, what they mean is that technically, if you dig into this, these
things are not a single font, it's a bunch of fonts, various sizes and characteristics
that are put together.
So like mine for my heading here, heading one says liberation sands, because I've chosen
that.
But liberation sands comes in several different styles.
So the next thing is, well, which style within liberation sands do you want to use?
Now I've chosen bold.
I could have gone with bold italic, but I just chose bold.
And then for size, mine is set at 145%.
And under that, the language, and this applies particularly to the spell checking, and you
can see that because there's a little drop down there, it has ABC with a check mark that
spell check says English parentheses, USA, I live in the United States.
So it's going to spell color without a U and things like that.
Then below that, it gives just a little, here's what it would look like, kind of thing.
And it says the same font will be used both on your printer and on your screen, and here
it is so you can see what it looks like.
So I think font is pretty straightforward, most people know that.
Then there's font effects, any number of things you can do here.
You could choose color.
Now I'd be careful about that, are you doing something that's going to be mostly electronic,
is it going to be printed?
If people printed is going to be printed on a black and white printer or a color printer,
you could go a little bit nuts here.
Various effects, capitals, lowercase titles, small caps.
These are all things you can select, but I usually don't particularly select effects.
You could, for instance, make a style that had all small caps, for instance, if you wanted
to do that.
You could do effects like embossing and engraving, those would be relief, overlining, strike
through, underlining.
All of those can be built into your style.
Outline, shadow, blinking.
Imagine blinking.
That's not one that very many people will thank you for using.
So font effects is probably one of those things.
I'm not going to get in much detail here because 99.99% of the time you don't need to go here.
The next one position, and there might be some times where that might come in handy.
You can do a superscript or a subscript.
There's probably more useful in character styles than it is in paragraph styles, most of
the time, but you could rotate it.
This could be really useful, let me give you an example that they use in the documentation.
If you had a table, and you wanted to have headers for each of the columns in your table,
sometimes you don't want those to be horizontal, it might look better if they read vertically,
and this would let you do that.
The way it works is it's like you had rotated the whole page and then written it normally,
rather than say, have the letters lined up the way you're used to only there one above
the other.
I'm probably not doing a very good job of explaining that, but if you take a look at
the documentation or play with it, you'll see, but that's something that would be useful
if you wanted to get into that, then you can play with the spacing or the kerning.
What kerning is adjusting the space between letters, just like letting was adjusting the
space between lines, chances are unless you're getting really geeky, you're not going
to need to do all of that, and that brings us to outline and numbering.
This applies if we want to take a look at, you know, in outline terms, we talk about outline
level, level one, level two, level three, that sort of thing.
So you could say, yes, I want this to be part of my outlining.
For headings in particular, that's probably a pretty good thing to do.
So a heading one is set up as level one.
I could also set it up to be numbered, okay?
And so, you know, my first heading one would be number one, my second one would be number
two, and it would insert the numbers, and then I could play with the style, do I want
it to be Roman numerals or Arabic numerals or whatever.
And I can even talk about restarting the number, remember, that's something that's frequently
an issue.
Then there's tabs, and you know, there's a lot of stuff you can do with tabs.
I think I'm going to probably going to treat that as a separate topic in itself to get
into all the stuff you can do with tabs at a certain point.
Then drop caps, and that is what that means is that the capable letters, instead of extending
higher above the other letters, extend lower.
It's an interesting effect.
Probably again, I might do that as a character style, as often as not, but what you could
do is have it for the first character of a paragraph or something like that.
Then you can set a background color to something, which, you know, for most documents, you're
not going to need to worry about.
And then finally, borders, which for a lot of these things is not going to be an issue.
But you know, when we start taking a look at frames, for instance, that's a case where
borders really makes a lot of sense.
Because by the very nature of frames, this rectangular element holding things that's
positioned on a page somewhere.
So imagine you were doing a newsletter, and you wanted to lay it out, and so, you know,
the frame might have a little photo with a little bit of text under it, and you want
the rest of the text to flow around it, and you want to put a border, you know, that would
be a good thing to do.
So that's been kind of a quick look at all of the things that you can do with styles.
It actually took us two episodes just to get through all of the style properties you
have here.
But you know, once we have that, once we understand what the idea is, we can start taking a look
at how we use specific styles and organize things on the page, and how this turns into
a real boost of productivity once you get used to using it.
I'm going to explain some of that next time, because I'm going to actually create a
style, and we'll see how that works.
So this is Ahuka signing off for Hecker Public Radio, and reminding you, support free software.
Every chance you get support free software.
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