Bug 90542 - EDITING: Jumping to an uneditable location on a page
Summary: EDITING: Jumping to an uneditable location on a page
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
4.5.0.0.alpha0+ Master
Hardware: Other All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: Direct-Cursor
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Reported: 2015-04-10 10:03 UTC by Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired)
Modified: 2017-10-08 09:20 UTC (History)
0 users

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Description Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2015-04-10 10:03:29 UTC
Presently it is not possible to access a section below the last sentence of a document, like it is also not possible to access a later position within a line. It would be nice to be able to position the mouse at a particular location and double clicking and the cursor is placed at that location by libreoffice adding the necessary paragraph breaks and/or tab spot needed to position the cursor at that location. The new cursor position wont be permanent until the user starts type something at that location.

This is a feature that i observed in Wordperfect and MS Word and thought it maybe useful to include.
Comment 1 Niklas Johansson 2015-04-10 11:45:56 UTC
Hi Jay

What you describe sounds a lot like the direct cursor functionality. If I remember correctly it was activated by default in the past but not anymore. To activate it:

Open Writer
Go to Tools -> Options...

In the Options dialog select:
LibreOffice Writer -> Formatting Aids -> Direct Cursor

Is this what you describe?
Comment 2 mahfiaz 2015-04-10 12:08:25 UTC
It would need a lot of guesses about what the user is trying to achieve. So I'll leave here a few possibilities:

* If the click is near center of the page, then use centered text.
* If the click is near right side of page use right-aligned text.
* If none of the above, then use tabs from the left. (should it stick to the closest tab stop or change the paragraph to match the click?)
* If click is below the end of text lines, add as many empty lines (paragraphs) as needed.

Other possibilities are first-line indentation vs full paragraph indentation, column breaks.

Also if on by default, it would horribly break my current workflow where I place cursor by clicking somewhere on the right side of text.
Comment 3 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2015-04-10 19:23:26 UTC
Hi Niklas,

(In reply to Niklas Johansson from comment #1)
> What you describe sounds a lot like the direct cursor functionality. If I
> remember correctly it was activated by default in the past but not anymore.

Yes it is similar to what i was describing, though it is limited to only the first, center and last of a line.
Comment 4 Niklas Johansson 2015-04-11 06:50:17 UTC
> Yes it is similar to what i was describing, though it is limited to only the
> first, center and last of a line.

Actually it isn't, look at the insert options directly below in the Options dialog. ;)
Maybe changing the default to tabs and spaces would be better?

Personally I'm not especially found of the feature, even though I can see a use for it from time to time.

It would be nice if the help-file about this would be a bit more explicit and list the insert options.
Comment 5 Robinson Tryon (qubit) 2016-08-25 05:39:32 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 6 Heiko Tietze 2017-08-01 12:18:17 UTC
Resolving the ticket as WFM because direct cursor works, but it's more a WF for me since the use case is unclear. In comment 2 the question is asked: What is the 'click on uneditable location' good for, answered with whitespace variants. But why should a user need to insert whitespace by just clicking somewhere?
Comment 7 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2017-08-01 12:22:34 UTC
Yes Edit > Direct Cursor Mode is now available in the menu to provide this functionality.