Lodahl's blog: 07/01/2015 - 08/01/2015

08 July 2015

Something about styles in LibreOffice

Styles are much more than defining the look and feel of text in a paragraph. Its almost everything about how paragraphs behave in the context. A Paragraph style for example defines how words are hyphenated and in what language the text in the paragraph should be spell checked.

Remember also to take advantage of the benefits of Page styles and Frame styles.

Page styles are mostly used to setup the general design of how the page is looking, but its also very convenient when it comes controlling the overall document pagination.

Frame styles is not commonly used (at least i think) witch is actually a pity. Especially if you use templates to control you document layouts it gives you rather comprehensive methods to control the look and feel when it comes to consistency. If you create new frame styles for different purposes, you can completely control the layout of the content in the documents. For example you can define two or three different image styles (one for small logo'ish images, a second for photos and a third for drawings and illustrations). Each type can have different behaviors regarding anchor point, size and even position. Also you can control how text wraps around each type. The same is relevant for OLE objects and frames.

Only remember that new custom styles doesn't have any effect unless the user manually assigns them to the objects.

List styles

Yes but avoid using it. It doesn't work! According to the documentation its possible to design and setup custom bullets and numbering styles but this area of the software is so buggy that its completely useless. Sorry to say that but thats how it is.