Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 66070
"Don't indent for the first PARAPGRAPH in the text block" option
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:37:48 UTC
Hi, typographically correct formatting (at least in the United States) is that the first paragraph after heading (or a list) should not be intended although the rest of the body paragraphs are. It is actually the default in LyX (front end for LaTeX) which I use currently. I guess (and hope) it shouldn't be that difficult to do it in any other wordprocessor, but surprisingly nobody does it, so I have to stay with ugly cludges like firstBodyParagraph style, which is the same as bodyParagraph style, but with no indentation of the first line. Thanks a lot for considering this, Matej
I have already filed now to the KDE bugzilla as bug 128539 <http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=128539>.
@ceplm: Pls attach - sample document - Any source for typographic rules concerning indent for first paragraph after heading
@rainerbielefeld In German DIN 1422 Teil 3 Abschnitt 7. Please mail me if you wish a quotation. In German it is "können" (may). It seems, that an ISO-standard doesn't exist. @ceplm You can get the desired behavior, if you set "next style" to "first line indent" in "Organizer"-tab of style "text body".
There is now discussion about this on comp.text.tex (http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/browse_thread/thread/4e8eca0058e4cc7e/) @regina Of course, I know that I can do that, but I think that I should not be forced to use two different styles to achieve this -- following the principle of "separation of presentation from content" (aka "structured authoring" aka WYSIWYM) OpenOffice.org should not force me to change structure of the document in order to achieve different presentation. There is nothing different about these paragraphs, except that because OOo (and M$-Word and every other wordprocessor I can think of) is not smart enough I have to keep them separately. Besides these theoretical reasons (and conversion to structured data formats like Docbook or HTML, where you have to keep one more rule to eliminate this first-line-not-indented style), it makes it major pain when I am editing (or maintaining -- wasn't OOo and ODT supposed to be about long term storage of documents) such documents, because then I have restyle this paragraph whenever I move it. This should be a rule which is part of OOo logic, not something I would emulate by different styles. Matej
That is a clear explanation and a good reason. It would be the same as you can achieve for HTML with the CSS <style type="text/css"> p {text-indent:1em} h1 + p {text-indent:0em} </style> Up to now OOo is not designed to support different appearance dependent on a condition "follow after", but all already existing conditions are of the kind "being inside". So it can not be a "defect" but it is a valid request for enhancement.
Reassigned to requirements.