Bug 74020 - Empty Lines Should be Ignored When Bullets/Numbering is Applied to Multiple Lines
Summary: Empty Lines Should be Ignored When Bullets/Numbering is Applied to Multiple L...
Status: RESOLVED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
4.1.4.2 release
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: Bullet-Number-Outline-Lists
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2014-01-24 14:03 UTC by Zeki Bildirici
Modified: 2023-01-05 19:02 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
Sample file to demonstrate the issue (11.64 KB, application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text)
2014-01-24 14:03 UTC, Zeki Bildirici
Details

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Description Zeki Bildirici 2014-01-24 14:03:37 UTC
Created attachment 92728 [details]
Sample file to demonstrate the issue

Hi,

If you have entered a list or or select multiple paragraphs and convert them to a bullet list or add numbering Writer includes empty lines to bullet list or numbering.

MS Word has that feature and disregards empty lines in numbering/bullets.

It will be nice to have this smart feature in LibreOffice. (Small but annoying if you are editing long documents with lists etc.)

I've prepared a sample file.

To reproduce, just selct some lines/paragraphs and press numbering or bullets button in the toolbar.

Best regards,
Zeki
Comment 1 Dominique Boutry 2014-01-28 14:04:05 UTC
LibO 4.2.0.3 on Win7 : I confirm the behaviour, but I wouldn't qualify it neither Bug nor desirable Enhancement. Let me explain :
- the specification is simple here : "selected components are grouped in a list"; IMHO to be kept as simple,
- number of people use a blank line to separate paragraphs (or list items), forgetting that it is a full-featured component. The right feature should rather be to use paragraph spacing.
Comment 2 Joel Madero 2015-02-25 15:42:23 UTC
So - this is borderline bug vs. enhancement but I'm going to go ahead and mark it as an enhancement. Enhancements have a very low bar as to what qualifies and this surely does. Ultimately though, UX will have to decide if this is the behavior that we want. It's not enough to say "Microsoft does it" as Dominique has some good points, but on the other hand in response to Dominique - in a dream world our 100,000,000+ users would know how to use paragraph styles, spacing, etc... but that's not likely. Furthermore, doing paragraph styles/spacing is substantially more time consuming than just pushing enter a few times and continuing to write. Lastly, if you have something like 10 different styles in use (where sometimes you want 1 line space, sometimes you want 5, sometimes you want 1.5) then it becomes even more difficult to tell users to use paragraph styles instead of just using the enter key -> hell I even use enter most of the time :-b

So - marking as NEW and asking for UX-Advise. Thanks to both of you for your thoughtful suggestions/comments
Comment 3 Justin L 2021-05-15 08:36:27 UTC
(In reply to Dominique Boutry from comment #1)
> The right feature should rather be to use paragraph spacing.
I agree. When you select something, you expect the action to affect everything selected. I assume that a multiselect (using ctrl/shift) would work for OP to easily number only selected paragraphs.

What if someone WANTED empty paragraphs to have numbering turned on, and we took that ability away? How could they do it then?
Also, one would need to be careful to allow a non-selected enabling of bullets on an empty paragraph because that would be a fairly normal workflow.
1.) turn on bullets.
2.) enter your itemized text.

I consider this a NOTABUG.

Interestingly enough, I argued in the opposite direction for a somewhat related table-of-contexts bug 141925.