https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83071

--- Comment #11 from Albrecht Müller <[email protected]> ---
I tried to give a few visual hints in the attachments, note there is an
attachment for each point to illustrate it.

Assumption: If you want to change any style or formatting, you can do this
using the Styles and Formatting window. If you think that is true you are lost:
You cannot handle the important special case of outline numbering this way. Not
knowing this exception you may try the following:

1) Define a list style that reflects the outline numbering.

2) Be careful, you may ruin your carefully designed list style just by pressing
a cursor movement key in some other tab. No clicking necessary! So another rule
of thumb - using the cursor keys just moves the focus and does not change
anything - does not work. You may not even notice the changes you did as you
will not see what the actual style looks like unless you go to the "Position"
or "Options" tab. There are various markers in the different tabs so it is not
clear what their meaning is.

3) Proposal: The Numbering Style window should always show how the style looks
like. For this purpose a combination of the visualisations used in the
"Position" and "Options" tabs is moved outside of the tabbed area into a new
"Preview" part.

4) Now you have a numbering style and you can use this style to define the
paragraph styles for your headings. The "Outline & Numbering" tab seems to be
the right place to do this. Looks good, you get your headlines numbered, but
not in the way you expected. This mechanisms seems to be completely broken,
e.g. the numbering does not care about the outline level.

5) Occasionally you may encounter an outline style that works. But how do you
change the numbering as the relevant controls are disabled?

6) You can try the help button. The kind of information you get is not really
useful. So far there was no hint that there is something special about outline
numbering. What you experience is just a broken functionality and broken help
information. So how could you get the idea to search for "outline" in the help
function?

7) The problem is that there is no hint to the tool you should use to get the
outline numbered. Btw: Why does the outline numbering tool use the caption
“Character”?

8) Therefore it would be helpful to place an additional button in the "Styles
and Formatting" window that opens the right window.

9) The "Outline & Numbering" tab should also contain a button with the same
functionality.

I consider the proposals given above just as some crude workarounds that could
improve the user interface with modest implementation effort.

Just a remark to "that other application": An office suite is very complex
piece of software, and I think there is not a single person that is really
familiar with each and every part of it, be it LibreOffice or "that other
application". From time to time, you will therefore visit areas of the
application that are unknown to you. In these cases the way how the user
interface guides you through the unknown areas can make a difference of many
hours of work. So problems in the user interface can be very expensive if
working time has monetary value. That is why I consider this kind of problems
very important.

Now that I think I understand how the outline numbering works, I can try to
find out why LibreOffice treats some, but not all header styles as plain text
when it imports a rtf file while a very old version of MS word is able to
interpret the formats correctly. I fear I will not be able to produce a bug
report about this: I am not sure if I will be able to reproduce the problem in
a way suitable for a bug report. Maybe Writer behaves as intended, as there is
some switch "treat outline levels 3 and 4 as default style" which I
inadvertently turned on a year ago, and I just did not yet find the checkbox to
disable it :-( 

PS: I had this text in WordPad and wanted to run the spelling checker of
LibreOffice. Simple idea: Open LibreOffice Writer with an empty document, set
language “For all Text” to “English (UK)” and copy the text from WordPad into
the empty Writer document. Result is: I see a single line of text in a header
line at the top of the page. Ok, I can use Edit --> Paste special -->
Unformatted text and I get what I want. So I do not bother writing a bug report
about this. A user that is not aware that there is something like "Paste
special" may loose quite some time trying to figure out how to get this work
done.

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