https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60064

ajlittoz <[email protected]> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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             Status|NEEDINFO                    |UNCONFIRMED
     Ever confirmed|1                           |0

--- Comment #9 from ajlittoz <[email protected]> ---
There appears to be some magic with the ToC styles. Thanks for the tip, JBF. Is
it mentioned somewhere in the manual?

The workaround you present with an n-columns table is a solution for very
simple cases with the penalty of numerous table management (I feel, without any
proven argument, that tables induce complexity and some performance cost in a
document. Thus the fewer the better (moreover, I experienced many compatibility
problems with M$ Office).

A less simplistic use case:
---------------------------

When I prepare a specification or contract document, during the elaboration
period, I need to comment the clauses and explain the rationale behind some
choices.

Visually, the document is 2-column, but since comments, new proposals and
explanations have to be synchronised with text, tables are mandatory. The
left-hand column contains the to-be-definitive text and the right-hand column
various data with their own styles so that they are easily identified. This
styling precludes the use of built-in "comment" feature and "revision" feature
is OK for typos but not very handy when a full paragraph must be reworded.

Lay-out or style is important, it is part of communication "art" and you spare
time if your revised proposals are already styles as they should in the
definitive version. But in this intermediate state, the 2-column format halves
the available width and some tab stops may fall outside the table-column
margin. This is important for tabular data when you want a tab stop some
distance from the right margin (thus my simple example with ToC entry which was
the closest approximation to my need).

Another use case:
-----------------

The same style may be use in different contexts (this may also translate to
"lazyness"(1) against the document author). Say style "descriptive" is used in
a "standard" section with "standard" margins. At some point, a table is used
with an item name or reference in first column and a description in the second
column styled as "descriptive". Once again, there is a risk of tab-stopping
outside the cell.

(1) It is possible to define a hierarchical style "descriptive in a table",
    with modified tab stops, depending on the original "descriptive", but
    you must define one for each table shape and width!

This situation occurs every time your tab stop semantics is "some distance from
the right margin". In the present LO implementation, this is specified as a
manual computation "margin_width - desired_dist_from_right" which cannot follow
margin changes because there is no way to tell LO this distance depends on some
other document characteristics.

It seems the magic for ToC styles does not apply to user styles. I tested it
for all tab flavors (left-, center-, right-aligned).

I admit that my proposal is something akin poor man's tables but tables and
tabs are not two facets of the same underlying semantic feature and cannot be
exchanged freely. In tables, you are locked in the cell geometry and overflow
splits your paragraph or word onto the next line. With tab, the text fragment
between tab characters may occupy adjacent space if it is empty; an "unused"
tab stop is skipped without adverse effect on lay-out.

The aim of this feature request is to decrease the document maintenance cost
and try to keep the company standard style dictionary standard, i.e. preventing
people from fiddling with it (sure, for good reasons) resulting in deviation
from the standard lay-out rules.

Are my arguments clear enough?

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