hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1875.txt

Episode: 1875
Title: HPR1875: 63 - LibreOffice Impress - Formatting Text
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1875/hpr1875.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:40:30

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This is HPR Episode 1875 entitled 63 Libra Office Impressed Formatting Text and in part
of the series Libra Office, it is hosted by AYUKA and in about 18 minutes long.
The summary is text formatting option Rxplore.
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Hello, this is AYUKA, welcome you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our ongoing series and this is Libra Office Impress and what I want to talk about
today is formatting text.
Now I know we have focused a lot on using styles to control the formatting of text and
there is a reason for that.
As I have said so often, uniformity of appearance is an important part of a professional looking
presentation and that is best done by using the presentation and drawing object styles
appropriately.
But there is a place for all of the other tools in press has and I want to go over some
of them now before we move on to other topics.
You can add text by typing it in of course and in many cases you will want to use the
styles that are available to you when you do that.
To do this, just open your styles and formatting window in the right hand sidebar by clicking
on the appropriate icon in the far right column.
If you are typing into a slide using auto layout boxes, the styles are already applied
to the contents of those boxes.
On a blank slide you can add a text box and use the drawing object styles.
Just type in the text you want to use, select it and double click on the style you want
to apply.
It is as simple as that and changing styles is just double clicking on a different style
to replace what you had with a new style.
But often you will want to paste in text from another source instead of typing it in and
this is where you will need to think about what you are doing.
Text that comes from another source may already have all kinds of formatting applied to it.
This is particularly true of text copied from a web page which will have HTML formatting
applied to it.
In general, the formatting it brings with it is not what you want.
You could deal with this in several ways but I think the simplest is to lose the formatting
altogether and reduce it to plain text which you can then apply your own formatting to.
To do this, if you like to use keyboard shortcuts, you may know that the paste command is generally
control V in Windows and Linux or command V in Macintosh.
To get your paste to remove all formatting, just add in the shift key as in control plus
shift plus V to get unformatted text in your paste.
You can also get there through the graphical interface if you prefer by going to the edit
menu and selecting paste special and if you do this you will see that the keyboard equivalent
is simply control plus shift plus V.
Finally on the standard toolbar there is a paste icon that looks like a clipboard with
a sheet of paper coming off of it.
If you have text on your clipboard that has formatting and this is important, it has
to have the formatting to begin with, you will get a drop down next to the paste icon that
will give you the option of pasting unformatted text or instead pasting it with all of its
formatting intact.
But note that if you don't have any formatted text on the clipboard, you won't see the
drop down.
So if you are trying to follow along in impressed, take a moment to open up a web page, copy
some text from it and then you will see this because it will be on the clipboard that way.
Now next I want to take a look at the text formatting toolbar.
If it is not displayed on the screen, you will need to enable it first, although in most
cases it is, I believe it should be opened by default.
Now the thing about toolbars, there is a lot of them.
Deciding which toolbars you want to have open as a personal choice, each one takes up some
real estate on the screen.
Now if you do most of your presentations by typing in text into slides that have auto layout
boxes and frankly that is about 90% of what I do, you may think you don't really need
to have this toolbar displayed all the time, but when you need it, it can come in handy.
To enable the display, go to the view menu, then to toolbars and put a check mark in text
formatting.
Now where it appears can vary a little bit depending on your setup, it may appear to
the right of one of the toolbars you have on the top, but with all toolbars, note that
you can click and drag them to new positions, either top, bottom, sides, or even as floating
toolbars.
Just clicking and dragging is all it takes to do that.
Now this text formatting toolbar, pretty standard stuff, first there is the font selector
and so let you choose which font you want to use.
Technically we call those things font families, but that is fine.
Followed by the size selector.
Then you have the usual bold italic and underlying and then a button for shadow.
Now in a program like writer, which is word processing, there is really very little call
for it, so you would not normally have a button for it on one of your button bars.
But if you want to do it in writer for instance, what you would have to do is select the text,
then go to font effects and add it that way.
In a graphical program like Impress though, it is something you would naturally use often
enough to make putting a button they're useful.
Then you have the usual text alignment buttons for left centered, right, and justified.
Followed by a button to turn on bullets.
They're on by default in most auto layout boxes, but if you're in a text box, you need
to be able to turn them on.
First there are some extremely useful buttons for working with outlines.
And if you recall from our earlier discussion, Impress uses bullet lists that are essentially
structured as outlines.
In fact, you can create an outline in writer and generate an Impress presentation from it.
And the presentation styles for bullet lists in auto layout boxes are called outline styles.
So they're giving you a pretty heavy clue here.
And that's what makes these buttons very useful indeed, both for working with bullet lists
in auto layout boxes and in text boxes.
They let you promote, demote, and move your items or lists.
First you have arrows that point to the left or right.
These are the promote and demote buttons.
Now these arrows may be grayed out until you've selected a bullet point where it is appropriate.
And then what happens on my system, for instance, it goes from being grayed out to being
colored blue, this can vary from system to system.
I'm doing this on a Linux box with a KDE desktop, and I think that probably has something
to do with it.
So what are your options?
If you're on a top level bullet, there's no way to promote it to a higher level.
So that left arrow, which is promote, is always going to be grayed out for that.
But if you select that top level bullet, the demote arrow pointing to the right will suddenly
become more visible.
If you select a second or third level bullet, you should see that both arrows become visible
because you could do either a promote or a demote.
Now the up and down arrows help you move bullet points up or down.
If you select a bullet point and click the up arrow, it'll move up a space.
As before, only the available options will appear.
So if you are already at the top, only the down arrow will become more visible.
But if you are in the middle of the list, both the up and down arrows will be visible.
You can also use arrows to move groups of bullets together.
For example, you have a bullet point and several sub-points under it, and you decide they
need to be moved up.
Just select all of them as a group and click the appropriate arrow.
These arrows are handy both when creating slides and when editing and refining slides.
Next are the increase and decrease font buttons.
These change your sizes by one notch as defined in the font size selector.
So what do we mean by this?
Well, if you take a look at the font sizes, let's take a slide title.
On the one I happen to be looking at, it is set to 40 points by default.
Now this is controlled by the presentation style for titles, at least in most cases.
But in the font selector, you can see one notch lower is 36 points.
One notch higher is 44 points.
So if you select the title and click the increase button once, it will go to 44, since that's
the next available size.
This is usually slightly faster than using the font size selector.
Also note that the meaning of a notch varies depending by where you are.
When you have smaller font sizes, they are closer together.
And the larger the font gets, the bigger these notches become.
Now the next three buttons are for character, paragraph, and bullets in numbering properties,
which we will get to individually in just a second.
But then there's also the font color button on this text toolbar.
Now in a graphical program like in press, font colors become important in a way they
never would in a program like writer.
And so that's why it makes sense to have a button here to do that.
Now let's get back to that character, paragraph, bullets in numbering.
These are properties windows.
So if we select the character icon that gets us a properties window, that lets us define
properties for characters.
Now this should look pretty familiar to anyone who has been following these tutorials from
the beginning.
As I have stated previously, LibreOffice uses standard windows over and over, and the
developers are loath to reinvent the wheel.
The thing you need to understand is that this window is used to set properties for the characters
in your text.
A different set of properties is available in the paragraph properties.
But for the character properties, you have three tabs, font, font effects, and position.
Well, font is something you've seen over and over, and let you select your font family,
your style, and size.
Cell font family might be something like liberation is one that I like to use or maybe
in other contexts you might have looked at Comic Sans or what have you.
Those are all font families.
Cell refers to things like bold, italic, and so on, and then finally the size, you know,
how many points the font is going to be.
The second tab font effects lets you add things like relief, shadow, outlining, and strike
through.
Finally the last tab position lets you raise the character to a superscript, lower it to
a subscript, rotate it, or change the spacing.
This is technically known as kerning and is really a topic for an extended discussion
of typography, but it means the spacing between letters.
In writer, some of these settings are in the paragraph level properties, but impressed
they are separated and placed in character properties.
Now paragraph properties.
When we talk of paragraphs in this context, we don't mean what is technically a paragraph
as your language teacher might have taught you in school.
We mean a paragraph level object, and we discussed this in some detail previously in the tutorial,
Libra Office Writer, Paragraph Styles, what is a paragraph.
Links are in the show notes.
So if you are not clear on this, please read that article for more information.
Here we mean objects like titles, subtitles, bullet points, and occasionally even actual
paragraphs to name a few.
Clicking on the paragraph button brings up its own properties window.
Again, we have three tabs.
The first, in-dense and spacing is the usual place for putting in an indent, including
a first line indent for an actual paragraph, for putting in a space above or below the paragraph
object, or for adjusting the line spacing, such as single spaced, double spaced, etc.
The second tab is called tabs, and is for setting the properties for a tab, such as
position, left or right alignment, and which fill character if any you want to use.
The last tab alignment is the usual setting for left, right, center, and justified, as
well as vertical alignment of text.
Then, the bullets in numbering properties.
This window lets you set properties for bullet number lists, and has four tabs.
The first lets you select a character to use for your bullets in your bullet lists.
The second lets you use an image instead of a font character.
So the ones on the first are actually characters in fonts that you're using just as a, you
mean, I suppose theoretically you could be using letters instead, but that would look
kind of weird.
But these are font characters.
The second one, image, you're choosing from image files, and it gives you a few more
options.
The third tab position lets you set the position of each level in your bullet lists.
While the fourth customize lets you do things like make each level different.
You could, for instance, use this to put a numbered list under a bullet or vice versa.
And where are the numbering options?
Well, when you first open this, you may not see them, because by default most of the time
people are working with bullet lists in impressed.
But if you go to the Format menu and select bullets in numbering, you'll get a five tab
window that includes numbering.
And if you use this to start a numbered list by clicking on a selection in the numbering
tab, that fifth tab will then be available from the button if you go back and re-edit this.
It's like you needed to first tell impressed that this would be a feature you would like
to use before impressed would make it available.
Now a few concluding notes here.
But our description of the possible formatting options was not in depth, because we have
discussed all of this previously in our tutorials on Writer.
LibraOffice is a unified suite, which means that the features introduced in one program
will be borrowed for other programs as needed instead of redone from scratch.
As we saw previously, the graphical components of impressed are mostly taken from draw.
Well, the text formatting options are quite reasonably taken from Writer, which is the
main program for manipulating text.
So if you want to see more details on character, paragraph, and bullet in numbering options,
you should refer to the appropriate tutorials in the Writer section.
I've written detailed descriptions of them.
I've recorded hacker public radio tutorials on them to talk about paragraph styles, tab
styles, character styles, bullet styles, and numbered styles at some length, and you
know, went into a great deal of depth, and I'm not going to repeat all of it now.
So go back and take a look at those.
I don't want to repeat myself any more than the LibraOffice developers want to.
Second techniques discussed here are for those occasions when you are not controlling your
text via the presentation styles or the drawing object styles.
If I plan to use the same settings again, I generally find it worthwhile to take the time
to create a style and save it in an appropriate template.
In the long run, this saves me time and effort, even if it involves a little more upfront.
And so with that, we move on to our next topic, and that will be multimedia, but for now,
this is Ahuka signing off for hacker public radio and reminding you as always to support
free software.
Bye-bye.
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