Making horizontal lines in Writer

_J_Van_Brimmer · September 23, 2014, 10:28pm

I'm using 4.3.1.2 on Xubuntu Linux.

I am creating some lesson handouts for a class I'm going to be teaching. I
have to email them to our secretary, who has to read them in MS Office for
printing.

The documents are formatted in landscape mode.

In the document I enter a short text line, press Enter, then I type in
three dashes, press Enter, and waula, I have a horizontal line for the
students to write their answers on.
Sometimes I continue pressing Enter to automatically create as many lines
as I need.

This works fine as ling as I stay in .odt format. But if I save the
document in .doc format, and then open the .doc file in LibreOffice, some
of the horizontal lines are missing. I have tried everything I can think
of, but I can't get all of the lines to "stick" from .odt to .doc format.

I have read the "Help" page here:
https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Drawing_Lines_in_Text
.
But those tips don't work either.

I am being forced to work in Winbroke using BS Word. Help!

Cley_Faye · September 23, 2014, 10:46pm

I don't know how well it transition to .doc files, but my approach to make
answer lines is the following:
- create a new paragraph style (let's call it "Answer Zone")
- change the style spacing so that there is no extra space before/after the
paragraph
- change the style border to be a single line at the bottom, and disable
the checkbox that merge the borders between paragraphs

...after typing this, I just checked, and that's roughly what the "---\r"
route is doing. Damn. The issues seems to be that the "Merge with next
paragraph" option either doesn't exist in .doc format, or isn't carried
over correctly. And no more luck with docx.

Some sort of solution for your issue could be to just send the odt (recent
version of MS Office can read them, YMMV), or directly send the PDF, which
is clearly the best option if the recipient of your document will not have
to modify it, only to view/print it.

_J_Van_Brimmer · September 23, 2014, 11:12pm

Thanks Cley,

I didn't think about the pdf route. That just may well work. I did try
sending an .odt to the secretary, same peoblem. When she opened it, some of
the lines were missing. I'll try pdfs next.

Thanks!

Tom_Davies1 · September 23, 2014, 11:27pm

Hi
Pdf is the best route imo. Note that the advantage LIbreOffice offers here
is that it makes uncompressed Pdfs fairly easily, or at least with
loss-less compression instead of making things a bit fuzzy.

You'll still probably need to use boring and over-used fonts such as Times
New Roman, Arial or for that wacky, friendly look the infamous Comic Sans
to fit in with whatever he/she is likely to have on his/her machine.
Students love dull boring old stuff don't they?

There is another neat trick if you are going to give him/her the files on a
usb-stick and be able to click a couple of things yourself. The Portable
Apps initiative
http://portableapps.com/apps/office/libreoffice_portable/
It makes the programs/apps available without having to install them onto
the Windows machine. Then when you unplug the usb-stick the program
becomes unavailable again.

It might be worth testing this before relying on it. I'd want the Pdf on
the same Usb-stick and easy to quickly email in case her machine is tooo
locked down.

I'm not sure how to help with the fonts but maybe it's something to think
about next time.

Why does she/he "have to" read them in MS Office anyway? I'd bet she
doesn't use MS Office to read Pdfs. At some point people decided it was ok
to have 2 pieces of software to read documents. Why not a third? It is
possible for her to have both MS Office for her own use and LibreOffice to
handle documents from people who don't want to pay exorbitant fees for
malware infested vendor lock-ins. Do all the students also 'have to' buy
into MS Office because the staff are given it for free?

Is it morally right for teachers to force their students to buy into
something in order to help ensure the staff get it for free? (Sorry, just
trying to give you arguments but they are unlikely to win you any fans!)
Good luck and regards from
Tom

Tim_Lloyd · September 24, 2014, 4:47am

Hi,

I was able to recreate this with Fedora 20 and LO 4.3.1 - has this been reported as a bug? If not I have an account and I can log it.

A few observations:

  * I don't think this is strictly a landscape issue. The problem occurs
    with portrait also
  * As you mention, the problem occurs with multiple horizontal lines.
    One line is okay
  * If you go through the laborious task of putting blank lines and then
    three dashes, enter,... the document looks okay. A tedious
    workaround if required.

Cheers

Tom_Davies1 · September 23, 2014, 11:29pm

Hi
Errr, what happens if you do more than 3 of the - signs? Might that help
Word to recognise them?
Regards from
Tom

_J_Van_Brimmer · September 24, 2014, 5:04am

Thanks for all of the ideas Tom. Inline replies below.

Hi
Pdf is the best route imo. Note that the advantage LIbreOffice offers
here is that it makes uncompressed Pdfs fairly easily, or at least with
loss-less compression instead of making things a bit fuzzy.

Yes, I created a test pdf from one of my lessons and sent that to her, and
she said that the lines came out as I had described over the phone. So I
think that's the route I'm going to use. I have no idea what she's reading
the pdf with, but probably Adobe Reader.

You'll still probably need to use boring and over-used fonts such as Times
New Roman, Arial or for that wacky, friendly look the infamous Comic Sans
to fit in with whatever he/she is likely to have on his/her machine.
Students love dull boring old stuff don't they?

There is another neat trick if you are going to give him/her the files on
a usb-stick and be able to click a couple of things yourself. The Portable
Apps initiative
http://portableapps.com/apps/office/libreoffice_portable/
It makes the programs/apps available without having to install them onto
the Windows machine. Then when you unplug the usb-stick the program
becomes unavailable again.

That is definately a possibility. I used to use the PortableApps a lot
when I was MS bound at work. Now I have more liberality to use Linux, so I
have to learn how to interface with the MS world from the outside.

It might be worth testing this before relying on it. I'd want the Pdf on
the same Usb-stick and easy to quickly email in case her machine is tooo
locked down.

I'm not sure how to help with the fonts but maybe it's something to think
about next time.

Why does she/he "have to" read them in MS Office anyway? I'd bet she
doesn't use MS Office to read Pdfs. At some point people decided it was ok
to have 2 pieces of software to read documents. Why not a third? It is
possible for her to have both MS Office for her own use and LibreOffice to
handle documents from people who don't want to pay exorbitant fees for
malware infested vendor lock-ins. Do all the students also 'have to' buy
into MS Office because the staff are given it for free?

Is it morally right for teachers to force their students to buy into
something in order to help ensure the staff get it for free? (Sorry, just
trying to give you arguments but they are unlikely to win you any fans!)
Good luck and regards from
Tom

Thanks.

_J_Van_Brimmer · September 24, 2014, 5:06am

Hi
Errr, what happens if you do more than 3 of the - signs? Might that help
Word to recognise them?

I tried that, got the same result. But thanks for the idea!

_J_Van_Brimmer · September 24, 2014, 5:15am

Hi,

I was able to recreate this with Fedora 20 and LO 4.3.1 - has this been
reported as a bug? If not I have an account and I can log it.

Has not been reported. I didn't consider that it might be a bug.

A few observations:

* I don't think this is strictly a landscape issue. The problem occurs
with portrait also
* As you mention, the problem occurs with multiple horizontal lines.
One line is okay

Yes, this is exactly what i observed.

* If you go through the laborious task of putting blank lines and then
three dashes, enter,... the document looks okay. A tedious
workaround if required.

Confirmed.

V_Stuart_Foote · September 24, 2014, 6:07am

Tim, *,

This is not a bug. Horizontal lines in Writer are a direct paragraph style
assigning a bottom border for the paragraph.

I would expect it to only be valid in ODF format--there is no reason to
expect LibreOffice ODF (.odt) style elements to be recognized by the export
filtering to generate OOXML (.docx) , or MS binary (.doc) formats. Or for
the style to be recognized by Microsoft Word in their native ODF
form--although a few of the borders are.

Writer (or rather the edit engine) provides a Tools --> AutoCorrect Options
--> "Apply border" check box to enable an autocorrect based short cut for
activating a bottom edge border of the current paragraph. Essentially,
while completing a paragraph, the immediate entry of a triplet of: - (dash),
_ (underscore), = (equal), * (asterisk) , ~ (tilde) or # (hash)
each will apply direct formatting creating a bottom edge border for the
paragraph. Each triplet will generate a different line style.

The actual horizontal border, and its resulting line will vary depending on
the character set and OS, but then the paragraph can be otherwise styled to
control width and color or even the line style from the Format -->
Paragraph --> Borders panel in the Line section.

Try out triplets of the characters above, and then adjust the Paragraph
border.

And, for OP, as suggested the PDF is the best way to render LibreOffice
documents portable for non-users.

Tom_Davies1 · September 24, 2014, 9:43am

Hi
I dunno if this would work but i like the idea of a LiveUsb, with a
selection of Portable Apps (in case the target machine had locked-down it's
bios boot-order) and with the Windows installer of LibreOffice on jic they
weirdly let users install stuff.

I've been successfully using a LiveUsb just as a storage device (ie so it's
multi-functional for different situations for me) but haven't yet tried to
figure out how to create a link/short-cut from inside the Live Session back
to the folder on the root partition. I'm guessing that's fairly trivial.

Also yday it occurred to me that although you can't get a LiveUsb of
Windows, might it be possible to install a Virtual Machine inside a normal
LiveUsb and install Windows onto that!? (and then LibreOffice into that of
course) That probably wouldn't be able to access the files on the root
partition but it might be fun for freaking people out!

Regards from
Tom

jomali · September 24, 2014, 4:56pm

My preferred way to insert horizontal lines is to insert a right tab after
the explanatory text, format the tab with a bottom border, and move it to
the place I want the line to end. The tab position and formatting hold for
subsequent paragraphs, so you can make as many new lines as you need. When
you need to change the tab position, you can do so freely. You also can
insert as many right tabs on a line as you need.

I haven't tested it, but I believe tab formatting and position is preserved
when exporting to word.

Brian_Barker · September 24, 2014, 5:51pm

I have, and it is.

Brian Barker

krackedpress · September 25, 2014, 11:42am

I use the Drawing options of
View > Toolbar > Drawing
that will place some drawing options toolbar on the bottom "panel" of Writer [4.2.x]. Then I just anchor the line to the paragraph or text.

As for printing PDF and fonts shown/embedded in other posts, I tend to use doPDF for Windows to print out a nice PDF file that embeds whatever font[s] I choose to use. I have some weird ones that seem not to embed in the "Export to PDF" option[s] within Writer. doPDF creates a new "printer", that look like it is a physical one. I have been using this PDF "printer" long before LibreOffice ever came out and I just plainly use it as my default printer for all my Windows systems.

I hate using those "auto replacement" options, since there are times when they get in the way of some of my document editing between Word and Writer.