Created attachment 163639 [details] numberingAndTabstops_word2003.doc: various situations explored MS Word ignores IndentAt if there are any tabstops specified. Writer stops at IndentAt regardless of tabstops (usually). MS Word stops at a default tabstop if it is before IndentAt. Writer ignores default tabstops - jumping to IndentAt. And in one case, Writer is very weird. It ignores the IndentAt and jumps to the default tabstop - which it sees as specified in the numbering rule. I can't figure that one out (the 3cm bullet). Steps to reproduce: 1.) open the document and compare with Word.
Created attachment 163640 [details] numberingAndTabstops_word2003.pdf
Created attachment 163644 [details] numberingAndTabstops_word2003.doc: various situations explored #2 Lets use this version instead - it looks worse in Writer. (I removed the copied numbering tabstop from the paragraph properties itself, so that it only inherits from the numbering style. In that case, LO uses the default tabstop for the numbering style, instead of the specified tabstop, or something like that.)
(In reply to Justin L from comment #0) > MS Word ignores IndentAt if there are any tabstops specified. > Writer stops at IndentAt regardless of tabstops (usually). Word ignores IndentAt if the style OR the paragraph defines a tabstop. Writer ignores IndentAt only if the NUMBERING STYLE itself defines the tabstop. The huge problem here is the mixture of style context and paragraph context. The style CANNOT modify its tabstop, because the same style can exist in combination with many different paragraph scenarios. So a lousy approach would be to copy the numbering properties onto each paragraph - which is incredibly annoying and problematic when editing later on. But the only other option that I can think of for maintaining compatibility would be to add a layout compatibility flag which acts like Word - which would be a huge, complicated task I'm sure. The last option is just to ignore these import incompatibilities, and force the user to design a more interoperable document - which is possible, but not necessarily intuitive. I think that is the best option. For export, this was solved (for most cases) with bug 59674 by changing ineffective numbering-style tabstops to be set at IndentAt instead. > MS Word stops at a default tabstop if it is before IndentAt. > Writer ignores default tabstops - jumping to IndentAt. For export, this hasn't been a problem, since apparently paragraph tabstops are defined, and so default tabstops never apply. For import, this could be emulated by explicitly setting all possible default tabstops on the paragraph. That should not be dangerous because the tabstops exist already - just that they are default. So it just means littering paragraphs with tabstop information. That's lousy, but a fairly common solution for numbering-related things. This situation is not commonly seen, since Word adds the style's tabstop to the paragraph itself when numbering is applied, so the case where default tabstops come into play is unusual. So, I think I'll mark this as WONTFIX. The effort is not worth it, the side effects are annoying, and the likelihood of these situations happening is small.