Numbered List Help

users
#1

Hey all,
I'm fairly new to LO so please treat with kid gloves. I'm a proficient MO Word user, but I'm really enjoying the capabilities of Writer. I've been using it lately to create epub documents from books that I find online and I find LO's capabilities in this area to be far superior to Word.

Unrelated to epub creation, however, I'm doing some work for an international client who uses .odf documents exclusively. What a great opportunity to use LO in a professional environment! Right now I'm recreating a document from a poorly scanned pdf, which includes quite a lot of numbered lists within table cells.

Here's my problem at the moment, I'm having a hard time formatting the numbered lists (spacing, etc). For the document creation, I'm using a fixed-width font (Courier Prime 12pt) to aid in readability before going to final form, using Times New Roman 12 pt. I understand this will affect list spacing, but I'll deal with that when I get to it.

I just can't seem to come to grips with the spacing options given under the list dialogue. When my numbered list gets to "10)" the spacing jumps to the next tab, but I can't seem to adjust the "tabs" on the ruler bar. They don't act like real tabs, if you get my meaning. Under the 'Positions and Spacing' tab on the numbered list options I see:

Number followed by...[Tab Stop] at ______

Numbering alignment...[Left]
Aligned at...________
Indent at...________

Can someone explain what these actually do? I can adjust the level one spacing by hit or miss, but when I try to adjust the level two spacing, I just can't seem to get everything to line up properly. For international documents (using A4 metric spacing), is there a standard for list spacing? I'd like everything to be lined up and justified on the left side, with appropriate spacing/indent for the level 2,3, etc items.

Hopefully, this was clear. Kind of hard to describe my problem this early in the morning!

ZP

#2

Hi :slight_smile:
Superb!  Welcome in :slight_smile:

You might find something in the official documentation
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications

I
suspect that the "Getting Started Guide" chapter 3 (on styles) might be
the most helpful but hopefully someone else might have a better answer
soon

Many of us were new quite recently so this is often "peer led" support.  It sometimes takes us a while to work out the exact problem and then answer it so plesae bear with us if we ask you questions to determine the exact problem.  On the other hand there are also people that have been here for over a decade.

Oddly enough we recently had a thread about ePub and generally found it quite difficult so you might be able to help other people straight away!  I think we did manage to find out 1 way of doing it using eLaix or something.

Anyway, welcome in!
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#3

I saw that thread...long and intimidating! lol.

Personally, I keep it very simple: I copy the document (cut & paste or type) into LO Writer. I only use the following paragraph styles 'Default' or 'Text Body' and Heading 1, 2, 3 for chapter headings. Occasionally, I'll use a quotation style as required. All edits are done in a fixed-width font for readability and editing (I prefer Courier Prime).

Footnotes are always end of chapter if I use sections and a master document, or end of document (which is easier to manage, IMO, since I don't have to mess with a master document. Some long and complex books with lots of footnotes get the master document treatment, with each chapter having its own section.

When finished with the input and review, I change Default Paragraph, Text Body, and Heading fonts to 'Times New Roman'. I don't use the writer to epub plugin...since I've had bad luck with it. Instead, I use Calibre to convert from .odt to .epub. The good thing about Calibre, is I can keep the .odt file IN the calibre library for edits later on (if I find an error, etc), and just convert it to epub again as required. Very simple.