In a message dated 2009.09.19 05:27 -0500, Brian Barker wrote:
... In word processors, a hard return, created by pressing Enter
(and the closest thing to the typewriter user's carriage return) is
a *paragraph* break (or new paragraph), not a new line. Writer also
has Shift+Enter, which creates a line break within a paragraph (also
called a soft return).
[Terminology note: In many word processors, a "soft return" is simply
the point at which the line breaks automatically because of page or
column width constraint - as opposed to a "hard return", which is where
the user places the paragraph end/break. OO Writer's "soft return"
(Shift+Enter) allows a user-defined intra-paragraph break: a line break
that does not invoke the paragraph's end-of-paragraph formatting.
However (see below), we may find that OO's "soft return", though
user-defined and not constrained by page or column width, shares an
important characteristic with the soft return of other word processors.]
Trying to think about the application and design philosophy of this:
It seems that a natural application of Writer's "soft return" would
be a paragraph containing an embedded list - several sentences
describing the list, followed by the list elements, all together forming
a Writer "paragraph". Is that correct? (If not correct, what would be an
application of the "soft return"?)
To make that work, the author ends the list description, and all but
one of the list elements, with a "soft return", while the last list
element ends with a "hard return". Again, is that correct?
If that is correct so far, we can think about text justification - OO
Writer's "Alignment" - a Paragraph attribute with these options:
Align Left [Left Justified] - each line touches the left margin
Centered [Centered] - each line centered between left and
right margins
Align Right [Right Justified] - each line touches the right margin
Justified [Fully Justified] - each line touches both left and right
margins, until the last line, which is usually aligned to either left or
right margin, depending on text direction.
But Justified text seems to present an application problem for Writer: A
"soft return" causes that line of text to be stretched from left to
right margin, rather than aligned as it would be with a "hard return"
(end of paragraph) - IOW, in this case Writer's soft return is acting
like any other word processor's soft return in terms of justification.
Is this a bug, or is it a misapplication on my part due to a
misunderstanding of the design philosophy?
John
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