At 22:46 27/03/2007 -0600, Jim W Wagner wrote:
Somewhere in the middle of the thing, the space bar stopped working,
until I typed the next non-space character.
Does anyone recognize this?
There is one circumstance in which this behaviour must be by design.
When it is flowing text between lines, Writer treats any number of
space characters as an indicator of a break between words. *All*
spaces between the end of one line and the beginning of the next -
even the first - are not displayed, even if the display of
nonprinting characters is selected. So if you put the cursor at the
end of one line or at the beginning of the next and attempt to add
extra spaces, you will see no effect. As soon as you type a printing
character, however, that will appear, and it may well disturb the
text flow and require Writer to move words between lines. If you
have nonprinting characters displayed, you will then instantly see
all the spaces that you have typed.
If you want to see this in action, type a paragraph of at least two
lines. Select the display of nonprinting characters. Put the cursor
at the end of any but the last line and type more spaces. Now put
the cursor somewhere earlier in the same line and type printing
characters until a word spills over from this line to the next. See
the spaces you entered resurrected?
Could this be what you are seeing? It is a feature, not a bug. If
you are trying to arrange horizontal spacing by entering spaces in
this way, you are doing it wrongly. Instead, you should be using
tabs, margins, indents, frames, and so on to achieve what you require.
You can skip the rest of this unless you want to hear some
theory. On a typewriter, the equivalent of the Enter key starts a
new line or inserts a blank line, as the case may be. In a word
processor it should not be though of or used in this way. Instead,
it indicates the break between paragraphs. Vertical spacing should
be arranged through paragraph format or styles. Similarly, the space
bar should not be thought of as inserting spacing, but instead
indicating the break between words. Horizontal spacing should be
arranged in other ways, as indicated above.
And here's a prediction. You know how setting text as bold or italic
a second time doesn't make it doubly bold or doubly italic, but just
leaves it as it was? Well, I suggest that at some point in the
future word processors will treat space and Enter the same way: any
number of spaces between words will automatically be condensed to
one, and any number of consecutive Enters will be condensed to a
single paragraph break. We'll be forced to use the application
properly, not as a glorified typewriter. And this behaviour of
Writer with spaces is the (welcome) first step in that direction.
Brian Barker
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