Lodahl's blog: Something about styles in LibreOffice

08 July 2015

Something about styles in LibreOffice

Styles are much more than defining the look and feel of text in a paragraph. Its almost everything about how paragraphs behave in the context. A Paragraph style for example defines how words are hyphenated and in what language the text in the paragraph should be spell checked.

Remember also to take advantage of the benefits of Page styles and Frame styles.

Page styles are mostly used to setup the general design of how the page is looking, but its also very convenient when it comes controlling the overall document pagination.

Frame styles is not commonly used (at least i think) witch is actually a pity. Especially if you use templates to control you document layouts it gives you rather comprehensive methods to control the look and feel when it comes to consistency. If you create new frame styles for different purposes, you can completely control the layout of the content in the documents. For example you can define two or three different image styles (one for small logo'ish images, a second for photos and a third for drawings and illustrations). Each type can have different behaviors regarding anchor point, size and even position. Also you can control how text wraps around each type. The same is relevant for OLE objects and frames.

Only remember that new custom styles doesn't have any effect unless the user manually assigns them to the objects.

List styles

Yes but avoid using it. It doesn't work! According to the documentation its possible to design and setup custom bullets and numbering styles but this area of the software is so buggy that its completely useless. Sorry to say that but thats how it is.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot for the article on styles in LibreOffice. I think the use of Styles in LibreOffice is one of the major strengths of LO over MS Office. Unfortunately, the developer team (already in OO.org times) seems to neglect improvements of the styles mechanisms in LibreOffice, so that MS Office could improve dramatically in recent years and outperforms LO in some aspects. IMHO improvements are important at:

Table Styles (Writer): https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34391
Chart Styles (Calc): https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62925 and https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39097
Table Styles (Calc): https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77569
Format themes: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45176
Picture Styles: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59906
and List Styles (as you mention in the article)

Mirosław Zalewski said...

Erm... List Styles in LibreOffice Writer works pretty good and reliable. I have used them in my master thesis, research papers, CV and elsewhere.

The only thing you have to remember is that you don't apply list styles directly; instead, you link paragraph style to list style and apply paragraph style. Also, some settings might be set up in both paragraph style and list style (indentations), so getting things to look exactly as you want might require a bit of trial and error.

Overall, the most pleasant experience with lists/list styles I had was in LibreOffice. I call that success.