Question about LO Writer and "complex documents"

users
#1

One of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's, Lewis Carroll, purpose in writing
the Alice in Wonderland books was to show how the meaning can be
misinterpreted when proper grammar is not used. My favorite example is
Jabberwocky :wink:

       Without good communication skills, then how can anyone be a part of
any community ???

#2

      One of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's, Lewis Carroll, purpose in writing
the Alice in Wonderland books was to show how the meaning can be
misinterpreted when proper grammar is not used. My favorite example is
Jabberwocky :wink:

but the grammar of Jabberwocky is perfectly correct!

      Without good communication skills, then how can anyone be a part of
any community ???

I doubt 'good communication skills' require 'proper' grammar.

f.

#3

Hi,
I'm needing to create a kind of table, consisting of two rows, where the bottom row is offset by half a cell from the top row. I'm not sure what would be the best way to achieve this - any suggestions would be most welcome!

/Gary

#4

Gary Collins wrote:

> Hi,
> I'm needing to create a kind of table, consisting of two rows, where the bottom row is offset by half a cell from the top row. I'm not sure what would be the best way to achieve this - any suggestions would be most welcome!
>
> /Gary

Make a table with 3 rows.
Select the middle row and with Table Properties > Borders select only the top and bottom borders.
With the same row selected: Format > Paragraph > Indents & Spacing, select Line Spacing > Fixed and enter a small size, for example 5pt.

With kind regards,

#5

Ah, I think I didn't state my problem clearly, as usual!
What I mean is, I want the cells of the bottom row to be offset by half a cell horizontally from those in the top row, so that the vertical borders of the top row come halfway across the cells of the bottom row.

(I'm doing a comparison of chronologies. Each cell width is to represent one year, but the starting point of the year for the bottom row is shifted by six months from the year start in the top row.)

Technically, it should be possible to merge cells alternately, but there'll be a heck of a lot of cells (as many as I can reasonably get on a landscape page and still have room for a few characters in each cell; I'll have to experiment, but I reckon at least 40 - 50 in a row) so unless there's a way of automating that, it's out of the question.
I'm guessing I'll have to have a separate table for each row; in principle that's not a problem; but I haven't worked out how to align the two tables (in writer); they seem always to expand to fill the page width and are quite difficult to resize afterwards. I'm guessing there must be a way to do this, I just haven't found it yet. If possible, I'd like to make the first cell of the row wider and have the rest adjust to a common width to the end of the table, but at the moment, at least, that's icing on the cake.

I've tried importing a selected row of cells from calc into draw to do this, in theory I think this ought to work well, but the problem I'm experiencing there is that cell size and formatting don't seem to be preserved when pasting the row.

I don't really mind how  I achieve it, as long as it's not too tedious!

Thanks,
/Gary

#6

Gary Collins wrote:

> Ah, I think I didn't state my problem clearly, as usual!
> What I mean is, I want the cells of the bottom row to be offset by half a cell horizontally from those in the top row, so that the vertical borders of the top row come halfway across the cells of the bottom row.
[...]
> I've tried importing a selected row of cells from calc into draw to do this, in theory I think this ought to work well, but the problem I'm experiencing there is that cell size and formatting don't seem to be preserved when pasting the row.

I have tried that and it worked. What I did:

Select a large numer of columns in Calc, and set the columns to the required width.
You can then merge pairs of cells. Actually you don't have to do all of them. If you have 4 or 5 merged cells, just copy these a number of times to the other columns.
And then you copy this to another row starting at the second cell, so that it gets indented.

Now if you copy/paste these to Writer they seem to keep their widths. But you have to use Edit > Paste Special > Formatted Text. For me the column widths are preserved. O, yes, if you do something with the column widths in Writer, with Table Properties > Columns, select 'Adapt table width'. This causes the table width to follow the sum of the column widths instead of being fixed.