At 14:18 03/02/2011 -0900, Tim Johnson wrote:
FYI: I'm a programmer but don't use OO Writer myself, ...
You are welcome to learn!
We have installed the mini-corrector extension which does a good job of removing extra spaces from the body of text, but it also removes paragraph indentation - which is completely unacceptable. :(
I haven't seen the extension, but my guess is that removing spaces would remove such indentation only if you had attempted to achieve the indentation by inserting consecutive spaces. That's typewriter thinking; please join this millennium and embrace word processing. In any case, if you use Find & Replace to reduce multiple spaces to single one (no extension required) you can go through them one by one, allowing the changes you want and denying the ones you don't. It's very easy: word-processor users do it all the time.
I find that *if* I indent a paragraph by using the TAB key, the indentation remains, ...
Good. That's better ...
... but of course a TAB is not a space.
Indeed, but you don't want spaces and a tab is better.
I find also, that although the specs that my wife is try to meet require *5 spaces*, ...
You should laugh at whoever gave you this specification and tell them you are doing so. It makes no sense in a post-typewriter world. A typewriter space is a fixed width; in a word-processed document, it cannot be relied upon to be so. In justified text, five consecutive spaces will expand to allow the line to span the margins - just as single spaces do. If five consecutive space characters happen to occur at a natural line break, they disappear altogether! Your authority needs to understand this.
I can't find a way for the TAB action to 'mimic' the 5 spaces and I doubt that there are.
If you know how wide you believe five spaces to be (as I say, there is no answer to this, in fact), then you can certainly achieve what you want using tabs. Simply set a tab stop at the appropriate distance from the paragraph margin. The tab will then indent by the same amount irrespective of whether the paragraph is left aligned or justified.
Better still, use the proper technique: set an appropriate indentation in the paragraph or paragraph style. Just go to Format | Paragraph... | Indents & Spacing | Indent and set a suitable value for "First line". Alternatively, go to right-click | Edit Paragraph style... | Indents & Spacing | Indent and do the same at a stroke for all paragraphs with the same style.
The goal is to remove redundant spaces from within the text, but not from paragraph indentation.
Just don't (mis)use spaces for this purpose. (Or use Find & Replace intelligently.)
By the way, there is another lesson you can teach your authority. Indentation was necessary to indicate the start of a new paragraph in the days of handwriting on lined paper. It transferred fairly directly to typewriting, where the vertical spacing of lines was still regimented. But modern practice with printing and word processing techniques is often to space paragraphs slightly wider apart vertically than lines of the text are, and in this case paragraphs are clearly delineated and indentation serves no purpose.
I trust this helps. Brian Barker --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.org
