It would be nice to be able to specify borders and margins (top & bottom) in section. Like it's possible for a lot of text block (tables, text frames, paragraphs, ...). It would allow to specify for ex. space between two consecutives sections. It require to modify the ODT specification which don't allow these attributes on sections (margin-top, margin-bottom and border-*). In fact I don't really understand why. To work around this missing feature, I use text frames anchored "as character" with 100% width of the body page. It works well but text-frames don't have the same behavior in the flow across multiple pages. Thanks
(In reply to Arnaud Malguy from comment #0) > It would be nice to be able to specify borders and margins (top & bottom) in > section. Like it's possible for a lot of text block (tables, text frames, > paragraphs, ...). > > It would allow to specify for ex. space between two consecutives sections. > It require to modify the ODT specification which don't allow these > attributes on sections (margin-top, margin-bottom and border-*). In fact I > don't really understand why. > > To work around this missing feature, I use text frames anchored "as > character" with 100% width of the body page. It works well but text-frames > don't have the same behavior in the flow across multiple pages. > > Thanks Hi Arnaud, maybe you can try this easier workaround: Format the first (or last) paragraph of the section directly (or with a style) so the paragraph, and not a text frame, has the desired border or margins. In the case of lateral borders, you can create new paragraph styles based on the ones used on the previous section with the left/right borders applied. I am no coder, just an user which also hunts bugs, so what I will talk about is by no means the position of the developers: I guess this change allowing formatting of the sections could be implemented as an extension to the ODF specification, as LibreOffice already does that for other things (we can choose to save using the 1.1, 1.2 strict, 1.2 extended or 1.2 expanded formats), but... What really matters is it would make the document appearance when reading or printing differ on other products, thus breaking compatibility in an undesirable way. Also, sections are rarely used on documents compared to paragraphs, tables, text frames, so the developers may not prioritize this kind of change when there are other tasks needing completion. Maybe you could provide reasons why such workaround won't suffice?
As at this point this bug is confirmed, but easily workarounded, I am marking it as NEW and lowering its importance to lowest until more info is supplied to verify why it should be higher.
The workaround from comment 1 is not a proper workaround, because, e.g., if you include a bulleted list (or any other paragraph with an indentation different than the rest of section), then the paragraph borders get split (see e.g. https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/137994/border-splitted-with-bullets-and-numbering/). There is another workaround: using a 1-cell table. But still, it's not intuitive to not have these options for a section, while we have e.g. background for it. I suppose that a good suggestion should be a motivation for extending standard, not stopped because of lack of support in current standard.