Khaled, may be you have some opinion about this feature? Should it be in LibreOffice?

It seems to be a Thai-specific justification mode. It seems to be in scope for LibreOffice, but more research is needed to understand how it works.

If you have thai distributed feature
will attract a lot of Thai people Because in official documents such as projects or college projects The thai distributed feature is required.

*** Bug 156763 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I have seen some discussion on https://github.com/w3c/sealreq/issues/19.

Copying my comment from my duplicate issue, tdf#156763, as it can be helpful:

Comment from 2023-08-14:
In MS Office, there is a text justification option called "Thai Distributed". The tool-tip says:

"Thai Distributed
Align paragraph to both the left and right margins by adding extra space between each two characters for languages with tone mark and vowel mark.

This creates a document with clean look."

Also, in the documentation folder of writerfilter, one may find this file:

writerfilter/documentation/sprms.txt

0x2461: extra alignment:

        4: distributed
        8: justify low
        5: justify middle
        7: justify high
        9: Thai Distribute

It clarifies that there is another alignment mode, "Thai Distribute(d)". Unfortunately, I could not find any mention of this mode in LibreOffice source code and documentation.

Here are some screenshots from this feature in MS Office:
https://pantip.com/topic/36134542
https://pantip.com/topic/30273386

This may also be useful:

Requirements for justification in Thai #19
https://github.com/w3c/sealreq/issues/19

Video description:

YouTube: Thai Distributed in Office word is the very important tools for spacing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7y4jOw9NJ0

Created attachment 200801 [details]
Screenshot showing justified Thai text

Example screenshot showing the current state of LibreOffice Writer

Unless I'm overlooking something, we already support "Thai Distributed": it's the default behavior when a Thai paragraph is justified. This was added to the code prior to 2002.

(In reply to Jonathan Clark from comment #8)
> Unless I'm overlooking something, we already support "Thai Distributed":
> it's the default behavior when a Thai paragraph is justified. This was added
> to the code prior to 2002.
OK, that is interesting.

Then, the issue is not lack of support in layout level, but in other levels of Thai support. Is that correct?

Looking into these files:
offapi/com/sun/star/style/ParagraphAdjust.idl
oovbaapi/ooo/vba/word/WdParagraphAlignment.idl

I see incompatibilities with Word. For example, this is the content of the second file:

module ooo { module vba { module word {
    constants WdParagraphAlignment {
        const long wdAlignParagraphCenter = 1;
        const long wdAlignParagraphDistribute = 4;
        const long wdAlignParagraphJustify = 3;
        const long wdAlignParagraphJustifyHi = 7;
        const long wdAlignParagraphJustifyLow = 8;
        const long wdAlignParagraphJustifyMed = 5;
        const long wdAlignParagraphLeft = 0;
        const long wdAlignParagraphRight = 2;
        const long wdAlignParagraphThaiJustify = 9;
    };
}; }; };

Only some of these are actually used / accepted in sw/source/ui/vba/vbaparagraphformat.cxx.

I can say distribute=4, thaijustify=9 along justify low=8/medium=5/high=7 (with import/export and layout implemented recently with tdf#155707), are not used.

Importing and exporting such values are also important for compatibility reasons.

Could you please elaborate on what is supported, and what is not?

(In reply to Hossein from comment #9)
> (In reply to Jonathan Clark from comment #8)
> > Unless I'm overlooking something, we already support "Thai Distributed":
> > it's the default behavior when a Thai paragraph is justified. This was added
> > to the code prior to 2002.
> OK, that is interesting.
> 
> Then, the issue is not lack of support in layout level, but in other levels
> of Thai support. Is that correct?

This may be a better question for the submitter. I'm not aware of anything missing in this area. It's possible this feature is working as desired, but was overlooked by accident.


> Could you please elaborate on what is supported, and what is not?

I'm not sure I understand the question. Do you mean the VBA interop? Or Thai justification specifically?

What we support is Thai distribute. What we don't support is a separate option for using English justification with Thai text. In my opinion, what Word is doing here doesn't make a lot of sense, and we shouldn't try to emulate it.