It would be really nice if there was a straightforward way to have 2 parts of the *same* line of text respectively left- and right- aligned. For example, consider a document with lines such as: --- This is the main text, in black #this is a comment in grey --- It would be nice to able to just use the align-left and align-right (or Ctrl-L and Ctrl-R) functions to do this. This is something it would be really useful to do, and it is extremely widely searched for: I found hundreds of people asking the question, e.g. http://superuser.com/questions/757575/multiple-text-alignments-on-one-line-in-libre-office https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=49577 Yes, I know there is a way to do this in a kludgy manner using tab-stops, but it should have a nice simple GUI method. At the moment, most "normal" users resort to padding everything with manual spaces, which is ugly inelegant and unreliable. One way to "overload" Ctrl-L , Ctrl-R to do different things could be: * If the whole line is selected: * or no part of the line is selected (just the cursor placed there) * or the selection is in the middle of the line. * or the selection goes over multiple lines in a paragraph. => apply the alignment to the entire line. * If just part of the line, up to the right[left]-most character is selected => apply the alignment to the right [left] part of the line only.
The enhancement is for handling text within a paragraph style. Suspect the limiting factor will end up being ODF standards, as this paragraph layout is not achievable as a described style in ODF. So, while it could probably be implemented--we'd have to extend ODF to be able to hold it in our document archives. Making it somewhat undesirable. By the way, yes tab stops are not a very efficient way to do this. However, the layout effect is trivial to achieve using either tables, or frames depending on the needs of your document. New to UX advise, for discussion of merit. But to my mind a WONTFIX.
(In reply to V Stuart Foote from comment #1) > The enhancement is for handling text within a paragraph style. > > Suspect the limiting factor will end up being ODF standards, as this > paragraph layout is not achievable as a described style in ODF. So, while it > could probably be implemented--we'd have to extend ODF to be able to hold it > in our document archives. Making it somewhat undesirable. I see what you mean here. However, it is still something that is badly needed, and really widely requested. > > By the way, yes tab stops are not a very efficient way to do this. However, > the layout effect is trivial to achieve using either tables, or frames > depending on the needs of your document. I don't think either of these works. It's certainly very inefficient to embed tables around all lines in a paragraphs. Let me give you an example. Here is a document I wrote recently (exported to pdf from LO): http://www.richardneill.org/images/electronics_supervision.pdf Look at the 3rd page (titled "Resistors"), and the small blue side-notes on the RHS, such as "← Voltage across the resistor". There are very many of these throughout the document. These should be right-aligned consistently, but as you can see, they are actually left-aligned with inaccurate bodging with tabs and spaces. It's important that the "right-align of partial text" is easy to do (ideally as simple as a single click on the format button) - and a table is not the way to do it (partly as it takes time, partly because tables are semantic objects, not layout objects). Thanks
We're replacing our use of the 'ux-advise' component with a keyword: Component -> LibreOffice Add Keyword: needsUXEval [NinjaEdit]
You can achieve the left/right alignment with a very large tabstop definiton for the paragraph. Special handling for L/R alignment is a WF as ODF is our foundation.