Bug 165507 - Properly support Start and End text alignment, correctly support Right and Left
Summary: Properly support Start and End text alignment, correctly support Right and Left
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LibreOffice (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
Inherited From OOo
Hardware: All All
: medium normal
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: Paragraph-Alignment Start-and-End
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2025-02-28 11:37 UTC by Eyal Rozenberg
Modified: 2025-02-28 14:54 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.
Description Eyal Rozenberg 2025-02-28 11:37:54 UTC
The ODF standard supports [1] six alignment settings for text in a paragraph:

* start
* end
* left
* right
* center
* justify

At the moment, LO "supports" four of those, and actually - doesn't even really support those four:

* There is no UI in the Paragraph Style / Paragraph Formatting dialog choosing Start or End alignment.
* When choosing Left or Right, LO often (always?) actually chooses Start or End, in terms of what's written to the ODT file. For example, if you create a Writer document with four paragraphs: LTR,left-align, LTR,right-align, RTL,right-align and RTL,left-align (with the first one inheriting the page style), you get this in an FODT output:

<style:style style:name="P1" style:family="paragraph" style:parent-style-name="Standard">
</style:style>

<style:style style:name="P2" style:family="paragraph" style:parent-style-name="Standard">
   <style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align="end" style:justify-single-word="false"/>
</style:style>

<style:style style:name="P3" style:family="paragraph" style:parent-style-name="Standard">
   <style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align="end" style:justify-single-word="false" style:writing-mode="rl-tb"/>
</style:style>

<style:style style:name="P4" style:family="paragraph" style:parent-style-name="Standard">
   <style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align="start" style:justify-single-word="false" style:writing-mode="rl-tb"/>
</style:style>

So, let's do the following:

* Have the UI show all six options, at least when RTL support is fully enabled.
* Save what the user has actually asked for, to the file.
* Rework the four-button group of alignments into a six-group button, with the appropriate names, tooltips and help text.

The dilemmas are:

1. What to do when RTL support is _not_ enabled - whether to maintain the "Use Start even though the user said Left" convention.
2. Whether to show the six buttons on the toolbar, only only the 4 buttons of S,E,J,C and keep the other off the toolbar by default.
3. What button images to use for proper Left and Right vs Start and End.




[1]: ODF standard 1.4 schema, 20.223 fo:text-align. Available at: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.4/csd01/part3-schema/OpenDocument-v1.4-csd01-part3-schema.html