OpenOffice.org 2, Firefox, and Thunderbird for Windows All in One [Electronic resources]

Greg Perry, M. T. Cozzola, Jennifer Fulton

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11. About Paragraph Breaks and Tabs

Understanding exactly how Writer treats paragraphs is the first step in understanding Writer's formatting capabilities. Knowing exactly where a paragraph begins and ends is not always obvious. For example, in the next figure, it appears that the document has three paragraphs.

If you glance at the screen or print the document, three paragraphs certainly appear to be there. As far as your readers are concerned, the document does contain three paragraphs. Nevertheless, as far as Writer is concerned, this particular document contains only a single paragraph! Clicking the

Nonprinting characters button on this particular document shows nonprinting characters that reveal this document contains only a single paragraph, as the following figure shows.4 Type Text into a Document ).

Seeing isn't always believinghow many paragraphs are in this document?

10 About the Rulers ) or from the

Paragraph formatting dialog box (see

13 Apply Paragraph Formatting) applies to all the text in that section. You won't have to format more than one paragraph individually.

14 Set Up Page Formatting discusses sections in more detail.

KEY TERM

Section A block of document text that contains its own formatting, including possible headers and footers, that will differ from surrounding text.

Tab stops are critical in most documents. Tab stops enable you to align values consistently across multiple lines. Also, when you use a tabstop, you don't have to press the

spacebar many times to jump to the right spot on a line. Tab stops enable you to start paragraphs with an indented first line. Writer supports four types of tab stops, as detailed in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1. Writer's Four Types of Tab Stops
Tab Stop	Description
Left tab	After you press Tab , the insertion point jumps to that tab stop and the text you then type appears to the right of the tab stop's position. A left tab is the tab most people are familiar with and use.
Right tab	After you press Tab , the insertion point jumps to that tab stop and the text you then type appears to the left of the tab stop's position. In other words, as you type, the text moves left toward the left margin, against the tab stop. A right tab stop is useful for page or chapter numbers in a list because it ensures that the right edge of the numbers will align together.
Decimal tab	After you press Tab , the insertion point jumps to that tab stop and the numeric values you then type will position themselves so that the decimal points all align on multiple lines.
Centered tab	After you press Tab , the insertion point jumps to that tab stop and the text you then type adjusts to remain centered around the tab stop.

Use the ruler to set and change tab stops.

[View full size image]

To set a tab stop, use either the ruler or the

Tabs page in the

Paragraph dialog box. You can click the

Tab selection button on the ruler to select which tab stop you want to place. Every time you click the

Tab selection button, the symbol changes to a different kind of tab stop. When you then click anywhere on the ruler, that kind of tab appears on the ruler where you click.

To use the

Tabs page, double-click the ruler or select

Format, Paragraph to display the

Paragraph dialog box. Click the

Tabs tab to display the

Tabs page.

The Tabs page enables you to set tabs for the current paragraph.