Bug 112019 - Character style font set in Bullets and Numbering not respected for bullets
Summary: Character style font set in Bullets and Numbering not respected for bullets
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
5.3.5.2 release
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: Bullets-Numbering-Dialog
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2017-08-25 02:25 UTC by Kenneth Hanson
Modified: 2017-09-05 17:47 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
Example of text with same character and font in bullets and text, which appear different (12.79 KB, application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text)
2017-08-25 02:45 UTC, Kenneth Hanson
Details
mockup (35.76 KB, image/png)
2017-09-05 17:47 UTC, Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired)
Details

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Description Kenneth Hanson 2017-08-25 02:25:57 UTC
Description:
Most Bullets and Numbering types allow a character style to be chosen. "Bullets" is the default for bullets, but the bug seems to apply to all character styles.

Font set in said character style is respected for numbering (1 2 3, a b c, etc.) , but not for bullets. Possibly the default OpenSymbol font is being hard-coded somewhere.

This can be hard to tell for the stereotypical black bullet, but easier if you chose a different symbol that varies more between fonts. For example, U+25E6 WHITE BULLET (◦) has a little bit of space before and after it in OpenSymbol, which causes misalignment with U+2022 BULLET (•). I tried to switch to Noto Sans, where the spacing is the same for both U+25E6 WHITE BULLET and U+2022 BULLET, but there was no change.

To make the lack of difference as overt as possible, pick a "shape" character such as a smiley face, and use that character both in the contents of the list and for the bullet, and choose the same font for both.

Attributes other than font, such as font size and color seem to be respected.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Insert a bulleted list using either the toolbar or a list style
2. Choose any character for the bullet, and enter the same character (Insert -> Special Character) in the content of the list
3. Change the font of the default Bullets style, or choose a different character style altogether, to match the font of the surrounding text.

Actual Results:  
The font of the bullets does not change.

Expected Results:
The font of the bullets should change.


Reproducible: Always

User Profile Reset: No

Additional Info:


User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0
Comment 1 Kenneth Hanson 2017-08-25 02:45:21 UTC
Created attachment 135784 [details]
Example of text with same character and font in bullets and text, which appear different
Comment 2 Kenneth Hanson 2017-08-25 08:21:34 UTC
Alright, prompted by the result of bug 112020, I tried changing the font in the character selection dialog. Lo and behold: the bullet character changed.

So it's probably not that LO is using a hard coded bullet font, rather it's taken the font selected in the character selection dialog. This is still bad for several reasons.

1. The font set in the character style still has no effect, which is dysfunctional and confusing since it works as expected for numbering.
2. In order to change the font for bullets globally, every list style, and every non-styled list must be changed manually, which defeats the purpose of being able to set a character style at all.
Comment 3 Regina Henschel 2017-08-25 22:08:21 UTC
The reason is, that when selecting a character as bullet, you automatically get a font for that character. There is no UI to remove the font information. But you need to remove it in the file format directly. Your document has for example

<text:list-style style:name="L1">
      <text:list-level-style-bullet text:level="1" text:style-name="Bullet_20_Symbols" text:bullet-char="☺">
           <style:list-level-properties text:list-level-position-and-space-mode="label-alignment">
           <style:list-level-label-alignment text:label-followed-by="listtab" text:list-tab-stop-position="1.27cm" fo:text-indent="-0.635cm" fo:margin-left="1.27cm"/>
           </style:list-level-properties>
           <style:text-properties style:font-name="OpenSymbol1"/>
      </text:list-level-style-bullet>

There the element <style:text-properties style:font-name="OpenSymbol1"/> has to be removed. Then the bullet character gets the font from the style which is referenced in attribute text:style-name="Bullet_20_Symbols".

I set this as enhancement request to get a UI to select bullet characters without direct formatting.

I have not examined whether the new list styles take care of this problem. But that would be a different issue anyway.
Comment 4 Kenneth Hanson 2017-08-28 13:12:55 UTC
(In reply to Regina Henschel from comment #3)
Thanks for checking on this. I think I understand what you mean by calling this an enhancement, since the design of the relevant UI components has to be changed. From a user perspective, though, this truly is a bug, because a feature (applying a character style) does not work as expected.

Anyway, I suppose something as simple as a checkbox for whether or not to use the selected font, would solve the problem. Ideally, you would want to be able to select the font with a dropdown (including None/inherit) just like the character style. It might take some thought in order to reconcile that with the behavior of the current and upcoming insert character dialogs. (UX issue for v6.1??)

Actually, such a feature would be desirable even if the user does not use a character style. Then the bullet will simply inherit the font of the surrounding text, right?

Suppose you have a document that use multiple body text fonts, and want bulleted in different places to use the surrounding body font. Perhaps with ordinary fonts and plain black bullets it might not matter much, but with more distinctive fonts and custom bullet symbols, this would be the only sane way to get every list right! Using list and character styles would require duplication of information for every possible environment, and manual formatting would be a nightmare if you were to change anything.
Comment 5 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2017-09-05 17:46:12 UTC
The whole idea of character styles being used for bullet characters only make this feature even more confusing to users than it needs to be, which is why i guess MSO doesnt do it.

My suggestion for how to fix the UI to make it more UX friendly would be to display the name of the font and the unicode character of the character in the dialog above the 'select...' button and a button to remove the font.
Comment 6 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2017-09-05 17:47:19 UTC
Created attachment 136040 [details]
mockup