When a user enables line numbering, they are somewhat interested in the relative number of each line on the page/within the document. Often, they don't want the final printed document to have a number on every line, but when working on the document, the balance probably tilts more towards in the benefit of more line numbers being visible (but not intrusively so). This is somewhat similar to table cell boundaries: Many of them usually don't get printed as lines, but are useful to help the user while editing the document. I therefore suggest that when displaying line numbers, at the set frequency we will see a fully-realized number (typically black-color; current default is once every 5 lines); but on every line we'll have a faint/semi-transparent number, which doesn't get printed. The user will have the option to make the faint per-line numbers disappear, either through the line numbering dialog, or by toggling non-printing marks, or both. They will be on by default to help avoid the confusion described in issue 150237.
Seems feasible, but not really necessary as we already have ability via Tools -> Line Numbering... dialog to easily enable/disable line numbering for printing and to set LN interval to something other than 5, e.g. 1 if desired. Adding feature to keep the LN print interval enabled, and add a non-printing "fill" for screen preview/active editing would be neat but is its utility worth the dev effort? The current control seems sufficient.
(In reply to V Stuart Foote from comment #1) > Adding feature to keep the LN print interval enabled, and add a non-printing > "fill" for screen preview/active editing would be neat but is its utility > worth the dev effort? That's a good question. I can't say, at least for the reason of not knowing how popular the use of line numbering in LO actually is.
The faint grey would require another option to adjust the color to the system theme (or we hijack one of the existing). The use case to know what line you are currently in could be better solved via statusbar having bug 123083 in mind.
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #3) > The faint grey would require another option to adjust the color to the > system theme (or we hijack one of the existing). We don't have that for the table "non-borders". So why have it here? > The use case to know what line you are currently in That's not the use case... you want to know the line numbers of multiple pieces of content at once. Otherwise - you could say the same about the Line Numbering feature in general.
We discussed this topic in the design meeting as a potential solution for bug 150237. Starting with a text would show no line number unless line 5. But since the dialog runs manually users should be aware of what they do (line numbering can be set in templates too, however). One use case for line numbers is minutes where seeing all numbers is relevant (so having an info in the status bar is not a sufficient solution). The "faint gray numbers" could be drawn similar to line numbers using the same algorithm. When it comes to print preview and print it would be suppressed. True line numbers could overwrite the grey "virtual line numbers". The function could therefore be implemented as a view option, if the effort is acceptable. It might also be an easy hack. Alternatively we could change the dialogs default to 1. => needsDevAdvice