With the fix for bug 118350, LibreOffice now supports the "Start" and "End" text alignment settings. In almost all cases, people want to align text to the start-of-the-paragraph, not to the left edge of it as such; and to the end-of-the-paragraph, rather than to the right edge of it. For people writing left-to-right, those are effectively the same thing, most of the time. But when switching the direction of the paragraph, right-and-left remain the same, but start-and-end get flipped; this is where the distinction matter - and the correct choice should be made. That choice is start-alignment rather than left-alignment, and this is what we should default to, everywhere (except where we explicitly want things like centering etc.) That means, in particular, making that change in all of the document templates we bundle, as well as wherever in the code we hard-code a fallback or default value for text alignment in paragraph. Similarly, where we currently align text to the Right, we may want to be aligning to the End. Example: Some heading paragraphs in formal letters are often right-aligned, e.g. date or address (although, arguably, they could be left-aligned but indented far towards the right edge of an LTR page); these alignments can be replaced with "align End". Of course, it is problematic to make this change before our UI properly supports this value, so see also bug 165507.
How do you know what people want, or are you the people?
(In reply to m_a_riosv from comment #1) > How do you know what people want, or are you the people? Same way I know people want the menubar at the top of the window rather than on the bottom: Nobody has ever suggested otherwise and every argument I can think of supports it. (Actually, we've been writing ODFs with alignment start and alignment end anyways; I wonder if some of the default templates don't already have that already.) But - you're right in that, while obvious, such a change requires a wider exposure before it is made. So let's start with a design meeting about it. If you have an argument against this change - by all means, make it.
This is reasonable, as we can now support Start/End in both RTL & LTR direction paragraphs, and still maintain legacy Left/Right handling, moving templates to the Start/End format is the way forward for newly created documents. There are a lot, but the mods should be negligible. With no impact on opening existing documents, only on edit and save. +1
Ideally we amend Start with what that means actually. Like: "Start (Left)" for LTR and "Start (Right)" for RTL. We had a similar discussion at bug 147814. And others, IIRC. In general, "Change all *" is not a good bug report as no single patch will fix it. Would be better to track this as a META ticket for "Labeling for text direction", which then could also cover other topics than just alignment. Well, bug 131192 is about this. My take: INVALID.
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #4) > Ideally we amend Start with what that means actually. Like: "Start (Left)" > for LTR and "Start (Right)" for RTL. We had a similar discussion at bug > 147814. And others, IIRC. Heiko, this bug is not about the labels, but rather about the values themselves: The fo:text-align attribute. The possible values for fo:text-align are listed here: https://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xsl-20011015/slice7.html#text-align and the proposal is to change from "left" to "start" and from "right" to "end", in: 1. The style definitions in the template files that we bundle 2. In places where the code chooses a fallback default value for alignment. it's true that we might miss somewhere from category (2.) but I'm sure our developers can make the list of the locations they are aware of, and that would either be all or almost-all of it.
(In reply to Eyal Rozenberg from comment #5) > ... the proposal is to change from "left" to "start" and from "right" to > "end", in: > > 1. The style definitions in the template files that we bundle +1 > 2. In places where the code chooses a fallback default value for alignment. -1, as a general rule, since it potentially breaks existing document.
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #6) > -1, as a general rule, since it potentially breaks existing document. That is a good point... if there is actually that potential. I mean, the ODF says (ODF 1.4 §20.223) that if a text alignment is not specified, then the default is "Start". And we have had the longstanding bug of actually mishandling ODT's with Start and End (see bug 118350, Comment 16). So, I suggest we ask the developers to first just collect a list of locations/scenarios in which we use hard-coded "Left" or "Right" directions, and then we can (perhaps) know whether a change will _break_ existing documents, _fix_ the handling of existing documents, or not affect it. If you think this part should be split into a separate bug from the template fo:text-align values change, we could of course do that.
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #6) > -1, as a general rule, since it potentially breaks existing document. If this problem is even possible, it can only affect ODFs with left-aligned RTL paragraphs with styles that do not specify any fo:text-align value. In local testing, I wasn't able to use the GUI to create such a document. I think the risk is low.
We discussed the topic in the design meeting. It boils down to the three questions a) make Start the default for new documents/templates, b) how to label the items, and c) what to do with toolbar buttons a) is not controversial and should be done. Pure LTR users wont be affected much and RTL users are likely aware of the issue and understand Start vs Left/Right. b) change Left/Top to "Force Left/Top" was an idea; to better illustrate the option we could show icons next to the labels and/or improve the preview c) one idea is to show all six items another to show Start/Center/End/Justify and have Force Left/Right available for customization (meaning to add these buttons but hide it be default); the icon adopts to the writing direction and rotates at 90° for vertical text, for example; we should create new icons for the options Force Left/Right and use the existing for Start/End Everyone is encouraged to share ideas for icons.
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #9) > We discussed the topic in the design meeting. Request for UX input was on bug 165507.