Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Full justification

At 08:01 25/05/2014 +0100, Ian Graham wrote:
> ... what I think I've learnt is [...] that the alignment buttons are 
> more limited than going the menu route, ...

I'm not sure what you mean here: if the "menu route" is to change the 
alignment at Format | Paragraph... | Alignment | Options, you are 
surely changing the same thing and the effect is identical? But yes: 
paragraph formatting has additional options, of course.

> ... and specifically that the 'justify' button does not work on a 
> single line, or the last line of a paragraph, whereas (I think) the 
> other three buttons do.

That's very standard and surely what you would generally want? The 
last line of a paragraph (or a single line, if that's all it is) 
generally has less text than other lines. If this was justified, you 
would see the text unhelpfully spaced out: in an extreme case, you 
might see the penultimate word at the left margin of a page and the 
last (perhaps only of two or three letters) at the right - with 
oodles of space between.

But if you do want this, Format | Paragraph... | Alignment | Options 
(or right-click | Paragraph... | Alignment | Options) provides, for 
the Justified option, various ways of treating the last line of the 
paragraph - including having it justified and even (where necessary) 
expanding a single word to achieve this.

Incidentally, for lines ending with line breaks (rather than those 
flowing naturally or ending with paragraph breaks), you can control 
the effect of justification with the setting at Tools | Options... | 
LibreOffice Writer | Compatibility | Options | Expand word space on 
lines with manual line breaks in justified paragraphs. That might 
help get what you want with individual lines.

> The query originally came to my attention when I was laying out a 
> 'display'-style document, ie not continuous text. There was one line 
> I wanted to spread as widely as possible without increasing the font 
> size. Applying what I now know: the Justify command (via format 
> menu) treats the individual words as sacrosanct, and just increases 
> the spaces between them, which can look a bit odd. Manually adding 
> spaces between letters overcomes this, and then inserting more 
> spaces (to taste!) in what should be the gaps between 'words' 
> progressively reduces the 'value' of the spaces within the 'words'.

You will get a more consistent (and therefore neater?) effect by 
leaving single spaces between words, but then adjusting letter 
spacing. To do this, go to Format | Character... | Position | Spacing 
(or right-click | Character... | Position | Spacing), select 
Expanded, and then adjust the "by" amount to taste.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker


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