A tab can be though of as a combination of the following: 1. A distance 2. A base point for measuring the distance (e.g. beginning of line, end of line) 3. Alignment relative to the tab point 4. Fill character from the base point to the tab-aligned text (I'm ignoring decimal tabs) At the moment, we support just three combinations for items (2.) and (3.), and we mis-represent them to the user. They are: From Line Start, align due line Start. From Line Start, align due line End. From Line Start, align at tab point as center. Unfortunately, the former two are referred to as "Left tab" and "Right tab", although that's not what they are. This bug is about calling them "Start" and "End" tabs (i.e. "align the start of the stretch of text" vs "align the left of the edge of text"). If we want actual Left and Right tabs - we could add support for them.
Eyal, as far as I understand your report, yor propose to change "Left tab" and "Right tab" to "Start" and "End". I can't assess, if this is a valid request, but I think we should treat it as enhancement request and ask design-team for their input and decision
(In reply to Dieter from comment #1) The specific proposal is not the main point. The point is that what we currently tell the user is incorrect. Whatever we says happens on the left, or to the left, or from the left etc. - gets flipped when change the direction; so it is all about the _Start_, not the _Left_. And the same goes for the "Right" tab. That's why this is a bug, not an enhancement request. But - the question of _how_ to change things would definitely benefit from a discussion in the design meeting. My default proposal is to refer to our tabs according to how they currently behave. But it could also be decided to change the behavior, or to expand the set of available tabs etc. TBH, even in that case, the immediate action to take would still be the rename, but maybe there are possibilities I haven't considered.
You are talking about paragraph properties > Tabs: Left (or Left/Top if CTL is enabled) and Right (resp. Right/Bottom), do you? And Left is indicated with a symbol so I wonder if this changes in case of RTL. A screenshot helps.
Created attachment 198780 [details] Screencast demonstrating the issue I hope this clarifies things.
Renaming sounds reasonable (although making it harder to understand for LTR users) but we probably cannot change the icon to indicate whether the start is left or right since the paragraph properties may be configured as a style and depend on the page style, which is unknown at the time of configuration.
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #5) > Renaming sounds reasonable (although making it harder to understand for LTR > users) Well, we can do two things to address that hardship: 1. Only rename if full RTL support is enabled. 2. Add actual "Left" and "Right" tabs; the distinction helps clarify the functionality. (and these two can both be done.) Note, however, that this will be inconsistent with our choice for alignment: We say "align left" and "align right" even though they're "align start" and "align end". > but we probably cannot change the icon to indicate whether the start > is left or right since the paragraph properties may be configured as a style > and depend on the page style, which is unknown at the time of configuration. One possible approach to this would be to introduce a mini-preview/illustration, in the Tabs pane, for individual tabs. That preview could show both an LTR paragraph and an RTL paragraph; or be click-switchable between RTL and LTR. Granted, that would be quite a bit of work.
We discussed the topic in the design meeting. Renaming Left to From Start and Right to From End could be an option, ideally combined with adding more options so users can force Left, have From Start, as well as Right, and From end. MSO works kind of similar to LibreOffice and deals with the problem in an elegant and simple way. When switching the text direction the tab inverts as well as the indicator (as we do) and the labels Left/Right are exchanged in the properties dialog so that the first item is named Right. This could be done as easyhack.